and oaks of all varieties, black and English, red and willow and scarlet.
As he closed the door of the apartment, Luther Boyd was greeted by a furious excitement by Kate’s Scottie, Harry Lauder, and by what he judged to be a gratified insolence from their housekeeper, Carrie Snow, a stout middle-aged black lady, who stood waiting for him in the long drawing room with her hat on and a brownpaper market bag in her arms.
“You’ll have to clean up after your ownselves tonight, Mr. Boyd.” Her white teeth flashed in a smile of relish against the gloom of the long room, which at this hour was lighted only with a pair of table lamps.
“Food’s in the oven, and the plates are out, so you’ll have to serve yourself, too.”
“Very well, Carrie,” Luther Boyd said. “And Kate?”
“She’s in the bathtub, but first she did some homework before she used up all that was left of that pheasant in a sandwich.”
“We’ve still got six or eight brace in the freezer, Carrie.”
“I know, but it seems strange.”
Whatever Carrie’s point was, Luther Boyd thought with a certain weary humor, she was certainly determined to make it.
“What’s strange about it?” he asked her, trapped by their relationship-which was blended of what: sympathy, courtesy, guilt? — into asking a question when he didn’t give one goddamn about the answer.
Barbara had never appreciated his frequent need to get back to barracks and training camps. In those simple environments, one could cut through just such knots of supererogatory sensitivities. One told a captain what to do, and the captain did it. Or he’d better have a goddamned good reason for not doing it. But here Luther Boyd stood pleasantly tired after six hours in an office and two hours on a squash racquets’ court, fencing with a gloomy black lady’s hurt feelings, judging without interest what finesse might incline this tiny, boring conflict toward a sensible and, he hoped, speedy conclusion.
“Well, the strange thing is, Mr. Boyd, is a young girl, I mean, a baby child, sitting around in the afternoon watching TV and eating pheasant sandwiches.”
There it was, the rebuke. Now presumably Carrie Snow felt better, having got that off her chest. Luther Boyd glanced at his watch.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to hurry, Mrs. Snow, if you’re going to make that bus.”
This was a nice, tactical stroke, but it made Luther Boyd feel irritated with himself, because that had been his rebuke to her, a dismissal, with all that meant to her crotchety but basically kindly sensitivities.
Luther Boyd disliked insolence, not because it rankled him in any personal sense, but because he correctly assayed it as a surrogate for anger, an emotion he respected, particularly if it resulted in positive and constructive action. Yet stern as he was in his judgments on everyone around him, including himself, he was fair enough to understand that anger was a luxury that certain blacks and other misbegotten creatures of the world could savor only in the silence of their souls.
Mrs. Snow looked uneasily past him toward the kitchen.
“I could catch the next bus, Mr. Boyd-it don’t matter that much-and put away the things after dinner.”
He saw the white flags of surrender in her fluttering eyes. (“Thank you kindly, General Lee. It’s a privilege to accept such a magnificent example of the swordmaker’s art.”) What else could he do but accept her offer of service? He paid her well, and he and Barbara and Kate treated her well; but if they denied her a sense of usefulness, what did the rest of it mean?
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Snow,” Luther Boyd said.
And so, his tactical energies expended in trivia, Luther Boyd went toward his study, while Mrs. Snow, her dignity flying like plumes, strode importantly into the kitchen.
Kate Boyd, who liked to think of herself as a curious observer rather than as a busybody, made it a habit to take her bath with the door open a crack so that she missed nothing that went on in the apartment, and when she heard her father’s footsteps going toward his study, she sang out, “Daddy, is that you?”
“Yes, honey. I’ll see you after your bath. . ”
“But I’ve got some absolutely dreadful news.”
He opened the door of the bathroom and looked in on her. The air was steamy and warm and fragrant. Kate was up to her chin in bubbles, and whorls of thick, creamy shampoo had transferred her hair into what looked like a great white Afro.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked her.
“It’s about Bob Elliott.”
“After your bath,” he said, and smiled at her and closed the bathroom door.
On this particular night, Luther Boyd would have preferred that Carrie Snow had gone home on schedule and that Kate was sleeping over with Tish or one of her other new friends. Luther Boyd did not mind taking care of himself, in fact, he preferred it; one look at him would have confirmed this in the eyes of anyone who understood the physical disciplines of thoroughbreds. He was tall and rangily built and, at the age of forty-two, still played hours of squash racquets every day, lifted weights, and worked out regularly with a judo expert, who was proficient enough to give him an active, though ultimately inconclusive, match. They played only for exercise, which put Luther Boyd at a disadvantage, for-if they had played to a conclusion-it would be no contest for him.
As a result, his stomach was as hard as something fashioned from whalebone, and as recently as six months previously, he had scored a remarkable ninety-seven over the Rangers’ obstacle training course at Fort Benning, Georgia.
His clothes camouflaged the power of his body because he preferred gabardines and coverts, fabrics which streamlined the width and strength of his shoulders with chiseled economy.
Walking into his study, Luther Boyd was frowning and rubbing his jaw with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, one of his few physical gestures which revealed an inner anxiety. He would have preferred to be alone tonight because he was trying to solve two problems, one simple and the other very complex, and the frowning concern in his expression now made him look oddly youthful and vulnerable. This oddness stemmed from the fact that everything about Luther Boyd, from his closely cut black hair, sharply angled features, and cold gray eyes, suggested a confidence and authority of such an impregnable essence that it was difficult to imagine a problem he couldn’t solve with simply a snap of his fingers.
The first problem centered on Major General Scott Carmichael’s putatively authoritative three-volume work on the strategy and tactics of what the general described as “Phoenix Confrontation” by which he meant “guerrilla warfare.”
That was problem number one. And that was why Luther Boyd was in New York in an apartment which he had rented for three months: to check the proof of the general’s three-volume exegesis of guerrilla warfare, to verify facts, dates, and place-names and, more exasperatingly, to reshape what seemed to him a variety of warped conclusions in Carmichael’s treatise.
That was the simple problem. Since retiring from the Army in the early seventies with the rank of bird colonel, Luther Boyd had augmented the income from various substantial trust funds by free-lancing as a military consultant to publishing firms, motion-picture companies, foreign governments and, on more than one occasion, the United States Army.
Luther Boyd’s special area of expertise was guerrilla warfare. He had served five years in Vietnam with Ranger units and had volunteered to serve an additional five years as a special consultant and instructor at the Rangers’ permanent facility at Fort Benning, Georgia.
But presently he couldn’t concentrate on the first problem because of the second, which was the fact that his wife, Barbara, whom he loved and needed desperately, had walked out on him after fourteen years of marriage. And there seemed to be no way to get her back. He couldn’t beg, couldn’t explain himself to people. Colonel Boyd had given orders so long that he was almost physically uncomfortable in relationships which required a democratic exchange of viewpoints and opinions.
Pacing restlessly, Luther Boyd glanced about the large study, looking for solace and solutions from his own personal effects, the hunting prints that had belonged to his father, the deep chairs of antelope hide, the small- scale maps whose battlefields he knew from personal experience, and the portable campaign desk on which was a tray of bottles, glasses, and bucket of ice cubes. And his books and charts and maps, of course.
Luther Boyd had asked the producer, his landlord, to clear all the shelves of leather-bound collections of scripts and press clippings, and now a portion of Boyd’s personal library stood in their place: military histories,
