it we’re through here.”
“I don’t believe a word you said about John Wayne.”
“Up to you, Chief. But it’s true. He was a draft dodger.”
He waved me off. Then grinned. “You be careful walkin’ around town, McCain. There might be a teenage girl lookin’ for a fight. And you know how mean they can be.”
There wasn’t much point getting mad. I was going to be hearing a lot more of it in the days to come.
5
Harry Renwick, a guy my father had bowled with, led me past several prisoners. Two of them were former clients of mine. One waved and one smirked. The smirker still owed me money.
I’d used the two interrogation rooms many times. Harry opened the first door. I went in and sat down at a bare table with four chairs around it. I didn’t need to light up. There was about a carton of smoke still on the air from the last few interrogations.
“How’s your mom doing, Sam?”
“Still trying to believe Dad’s really gone.”
He smiled. “Those World War Two guys, they always told us we had it easy in Korea.”
It seemed more and more that the American Dream had turned into a war for every generation.
“Yeah, my dad could really get going sometimes.”
“He was a great guy, Sam. One of my best friends. And he sure was proud of you.” I’d wondered what was wrong with me after my father passed on. I never cried. I knew in the abstract I wanted to but somehow the tears never came. Now sometimes at odd moments I just wanted to let go. This was one of those moments, sitting here in an interrogation room where people were dragged to confess the terrible things they’d done-I just wanted to put my head down and wail for the father I loved so much. And who I’d never see again.
A knock on the half-opened door. Sarah Powers stood there in the two-piece maroon jail uniform. She looked heavy, pasty, and angry. The only fashion accessory she’d been allowed were the handcuffs. A police matron nudged her inside.
Harry pulled a chair back for her. She sat down. Only when she was seated for a time did I see how fatigue had drawn crevices in her face.
The matron, a scrawny Irish woman, said, “I’ll be right outside.”
“You tell your mom I said hi.”
“I sure will, Harry. Nice to see you.” Then, whispering, I said: “This room bugged?”
Harry shook his head. “Not this one. The one down the hall.”
After he was gone, Sarah said, “It was either you or a public defender. I didn’t have any choice.”
“You trying to flatter me?”
“Oh, go to hell, McCain.”
“We’re off to a good start.”
Silence.
“How’re you doing in here?”
Silence.
“You asked for me, remember? You keep this up, I’m going to walk out the door. You understand me?”
She raised her cuffed hands to her face and sighed. After she put her hands on the table again, she said, “There’s a woman in my cell who left her baby in her car for three hours while she was in some dive seeing her boyfriend while her husband was home sleeping off a hangover. Thank God a cop came along and found the little baby. The woman was telling me that she shouldn’t be in here. That she’s actually a good mother. This is the second time she’s done this. Then there are the two prostitutes. And the woman who embezzled money from the trucking company where she worked. Not exactly the kind of people I’m used to.”
I took out my cigarettes and placed them on the table. I sat close enough to give her drags.
She didn’t thank me but her tone changed. It was as if she was suddenly too tired to argue. “Neil wasn’t like this before he went to Nam. He was just a nice, normal kid. But when he came back-They actually had to put him in a mental hospital for three months.”
“Tell me how he changed.”
“He’d always been kind of quiet. Got average grades. Never got in trouble. Wasn’t a big reader but he loved going to movies. He went to junior college-this was in Des Plaines where we grew up-and he really liked it. He started getting interested in books for the first time. But then he got his draft notice. They didn’t think junior college was good enough for a deferment so they shipped him off. He didn’t write much, and when he did, he didn’t really tell me anything. He’d talk about the food and the local customs but nothing about how he felt or anything. In his letters he didn’t sound the same anymore. I always figured he’d tell me everything when he got back.”
“Did he?”
“No. But a kid he served with told me about something that happened to Neil over there. They were approaching this sort of hamlet-there were five of them-and there was firing from two of the huts. While four of them worked on the two huts, Neil swung around and checked out the other three. He heard noise in one of them and opened fire. When he looked in to see who’d been in there he found two little girls. They’d been huddled in the corner. His bullets had torn them apart. He said Neil was never the same after that. When they’d go into Saigon all Neil wanted to do was get drunk and start fights. My brother Neil, fighting? He might have been in a few shoving matches on the playground but that was the extent of it. And now he was always picking on bigger and tougher guys who were sure to hurt him pretty bad. You don’t have to be a psych major to know that he wanted somebody to punish him, do you?”
Her shoulders slumped and she exhaled long and hard. Not even hatred can exhaust you the way love can. “He was that way when he got back home, too. He had nightmares that woke up the whole house. My biggest fear was that he was going to kill himself. And in a way he tried to. All the fights and two drunk driving arrests and confrontations with half the people he ran into. I thought when he met this girl Jenny he might come out of it at least a little ways. He cleaned himself up physically and cut way back on the alcohol. He was always decent to me. I think I was the only person he’d ever really trusted.”
“It went well for three or four months, with Jenny I mean. One night he even told me he was thinking about going back to junior college because she was going to enroll there for a year before going on to a state school. He even said they might get married. But then she started breaking up with him all the time. I couldn’t figure out why. Then one day I ran into her at a restaurant in a mall and she told me everything. She was only nineteen and she just wasn’t ready for the kind of commitment my brother wanted. She said they’d agree not to talk about marriage but then the subject always came up and he’d get angry and she’d get scared.”
“Was he ever violent with her?”
“No. She said that wasn’t what scared her. She had the same fear I did, that he’d take his own life. She was afraid to break it off completely because of that but she couldn’t deal with Neil anymore, either. Then she said something that I’ve never forgotten. Neil told her that the only time he didn’t have nightmares was when things were going well with them. Then I realized how dependent he was on her. She made him feel good again-much better than the army counselor in Nam he saw who just kind of ran him through his office once a month. I sympathized with her. And Jenny was a sweet girl. She told me that she’d decided that the easiest way out was to go to the University of Illinois for freshman year and leave in a week.”
“She went and that’s when the trouble really started. He lost his job, he gave his best friend a black eye, and he swung on a cop who was trying to arrest him for drunk and disorderly. He managed to escape, and that’s when he disappeared for a while. I was the only one he contacted. He knew if he came back he’d have to go to county jail or maybe even prison and he said he couldn’t do it. But I convinced him he couldn’t keep running like that. I got him a good lawyer. He served six months in county in Illinois. After he got out he drifted to Iowa City and that’s where he met Richard. Richard invited him to live at the commune. Neil got a job in town working at a discount store. I’d just graduated college and had free time so I came here to live in the commune and try to straighten him out. He’d already been seeing Vanessa Mainwaring. I met her a few times and liked her. I think Neil had learned about not pushing too hard. They seemed very happy together. Then they had this argument. I never knew what it was about.
