looking brighter .
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
Brattle’s wife gasped.
“Sorry,” Keegan said, “I forgot where I was for a minute.”
“Well, I should hope so,” Brattle growled.
Keegan leaned back in his chair and picked up a copy of the afternoon
“Here’s our great president in his celluloid collar and button-up shoes telling a troop of Girl Scouts bow great things are. ‘Nobody has ever died of starvation in this country,’ he says. Then we turn to this little three-paragraph yarn on page twenty- six.” Keegan read it slowly: “‘The New York City Welfare Department said today twenty-nine people died of starvation in June in the city and 194 others, mostly children, died of malnutrition.’” He paused for a moment. “Which page of the paper do you read?”
There was a momentary pall over the conversation, then Evelyn Brattle said cryptically, “Well, that’s New York City for you.”
A young woman shook her shoulders. “It’s the stock market,” she peeped. “Too many people were playing the stock market who didn’t know what they were doing.”
“That’s right, darlin’,” Brattle said smugly. “Listen, investors lost seventy-four billion dollars in the stock market, Francis, that’s three times what the war cost, and most of them were upper middle-class jerks who shouldn’t have been in it in the first place.”
“But they pumped it up for people like us, right, Charlie?”
“You’re beginning to sound like a goddamn Bolshevist.”
Keegan had laughed. “Same old story,” he countered, “if you don’t think like I do, you’re a Red.”
“Well, hell, it’s a natural process,” Brattle said, brushing off the comment. “The world goes through this kind of thing every thirty, forty, fifty years. Leans out the population. Gets rid of the runts.”
Never mind that many of those destroyed were bankers, brokers, their own peers, a fact that was obvious from the number of homburgs and chesterfield coats in the soup kitchen lineups. Brattle’s attitude was typical; the rich “leaning out” the runts of the litter. So Keegan suppressed his disdain. There was no discussing it further with the people at Brattle’s table. Theirs was the hardened attitude of the fats against the leans.
About nine o’clock, Keegan heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. A few minutes later the sweet, stinging odor of tear gas drifted out across the river.
Then came the other sounds: the faraway screams, the neighing of horses and the bizarre creaking of tank treads on cobblestones. And suddenly the night seemed lit by dozens of fires.
“By God, it’s started!” Brattle cried out. “Hoover’s finally moving on the bastards.”
The dinner party pressed against the railing of the yacht, searching the night for a view of the battle. Then another yacht cruised past and someone yelled, “Hey Charlie, they’re crossing the Eleventh Street Bridge!”
Brattle had immediately ordered his captain to move the yacht out into the river and down to the bridge, there to join other yachts and pleasure boats crowded near the shore to watch the tawdry spectacle. They moved in closer for a better look, lying close to the bridge, where a major named Eisenhower had set up machine guns to prevent the ex-soldiers from moving back into the city. They watched as a chunky major on horseback, wearing pearl-handled revolvers, ordered his men to douse the ragged main village on the edge of the Anacostia River with gasoline and burn it. The scene became nightmarish. Flames broiled into the black sky and horses and men with brandished sabers galloped to and fro in front of the crackling inferno. Tear gas bombs were lobbed through the night and burst on the sidewalks as women and children ran screaming before the onslaught.
Keegan suddenly felt a desperate need to know what was happening. He stood on the deck of the yacht horrified by what the army was doing to its own ex-comrades in arms, recalling a time fourteen years before when he had been a small part of the catastrophe that had started all this.
At that moment, standing on the deck of Brattle’s yacht, Keegan felt a desperate need for a Bert Rudman to describe the full sweep of what was happening around him. Could this incredible attack on the veterans be happening all over the city, or was this an isolated incident of violence? He had to know.
“By God, they’re cleaning that bunch of Commies out,” Brattle proudly proclaimed, slapping his leg.
“They’re not Commies, for God’s sake, they’re army veterans,” Keegan cried out angrily, and whirling on his heels, ordered the yacht’s long boat to take him back to the pier.
On the way to the hotel, Jocko had skirted what had been the major thrust of the army’s attack on the Bonus villages, the streets littered with used tear gas canisters and remnants of canvas and cardboard houses. As they passed an abandoned park, Keegan told Jocko to stop.
Keegan got out of the car, threw off his jacket and tie and walked down a knoll, out into the remains of one of the tent villages, now a scene of devastation. Nothing was left standing.
A man in a tattered shirt, its right sleeve folded up over the stub of his missing arm and pinned at the shoulder, wandered numbly toward him, stumbling through the remnants of the camp, silhouetted by the fires of the main camp several blocks away. He stopped for a moment and stared at a ragged sign, “God bless our home,” fluttering feebly from a shattered tent pole.
Tear gas tears had made scant streaks in the dirt on the man’s cheeks. On his shirt were pinned a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. He moved on, stumbling in shock through the wreckage of the Bonus village, staring bleakly at the ruined tents, the burned lean-tos, the shattered remains of chicken coop houses and cardboard shacks, and the trampled gardens and broken suitcases and ragged remains of clothing. He looked under pieces of cardboard and canvas.
“Tommy!” he yelled. “Tommy-boy, it’s yer dad.”
He almost bumped into Keegan, so intent was he on examining the wreckage scattered around him. He looked Keegan up and down, studying his freshly laundered shirt and Palm Beach pants.
