Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) (11 page)

I’d tuned the radio to an oldies station and my mind drifted into the memories brought back by the sounds of my youth. When I was a boy, I listened each week to the preacher at the church my mother took us to. Most days I was bored, fidgety, anxious to leave the sanctuary and stop by the ice-cream shop in the next block. That was the deal Mom made with my little brother and me. Go to church, sit still, pretend to listen, and you can have a double scoop of chocolate in a sugar cone.

My mother was a strange woman in many ways. She didn’t like my father very much, but lived with him in sort of an armed truce. There were never the sweet kind words that seem to pass between most lovers. Acrimony was the norm; loud, complaining, bitter acrimony. My dad just sat and listened, never raising his voice. More often than not, he had fortified himself with cheap bourbon before he came home. He’d sit alone in the kitchen, sipping from a glass of whiskey that he kept in the refrigerator. No ice. That only weakened the drink. But he was in reach of the refrigerator and from my and my brother’s room I could hear the rhythmic swoosh of the opening of the door as he retrieved the glass, took a sip, returned it, and closed the door.

On some Sundays, the preacher talked about evil. That always got my attention. I wasn’t sure what evil was or how I would know it if I saw it. I was told that the devil, old Satan, was evil. I figured that if I ever saw a red man with cloven hooves, a forked tail, and a pitchfork I would recognize him and know the face of evil. In reality, it wasn’t that easy.

I’m not a religious man. I think war cured me of that. I had finally seen evil in the war, the one that had almost consumed me. How could a good and merciful and omnipotent God allow evil to exist? Another paradox, a question that is unanswerable. I respect all religious beliefs and the men and women of faith who follow their teachings. It occurs to me that there are certain universal truths that are accepted by most religions. They all seem to support the dignity of man, his need to live in peace, safe from harm, insulated from evil. We have fashioned laws based on these almost universal tenets, the laws that grace our criminal justice system and
those of most cultures. Some are harsh, much harsher than our Western minds will accept, and some of them seem so mired in the Dark Ages that I despair of their ever finding the light of modernity. But their basic laws, those that prohibit behavior, are very similar to our own. The Code of Hammurabi, first promulgated in the eighteenth century BC, almost four thousand years ago, is not that different from the proscriptions of certain behavior that are found in the modern Florida Statutes. Evil, it seems, is universal.

I’d read about evil. I knew about the Nazis and the Holocaust. I could never square the absurd contradictions presented by that terrible time. How could a nation that produced a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Brahms also produce a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Goering? How could a nation sink into such an abysmal pit of evil that it could not hope to recover its honor?

And I’d read about serial killers, those madmen who killed for the sheer excitement of murder. What drove them, if not evil? Yes, I knew evil existed, but I’ve never seen it. I’d seen meanness, knew men who were racists, heard terrible stories of ogres and trolls and monsters. But I’d never actually seen evil, not until I passed my nineteenth birthday in a faraway land. And then the evil I saw was to my amazement, homegrown.

I’d gone to war as a teenager. I’d killed men who were trying to kill me, but they weren’t evil. I knew even as I shot them that they were simply patriots in a different uniform, fighting for their country and their buddies. They had families and friends who would mourn their deaths, and that made me sad. But I killed them just the same, because the alternative was for them to kill me.

One day when our A team was working its way from the landing zone back to base camp, crawling through thick and fetid jungle, killing a few of the enemy and getting shot at by other boys in different uniforms, we came upon a clearing. It was quiet there, the intense sun beating down through the opening in the trees. There were no bird cries, no rustling of animals, no shouts of soldiers. Only silence. Then I saw why, or perhaps I smelled it first.

Bodies were stacked in the middle of the clearing, the stench of decay rising like a cloud of steam. Two white men, big men, stripped to their
shorts, were throwing another body onto the pile. There were men, women, and children in that pile, old and young, all small Asians. Not Vietnamese, but tribesmen who ranged in this country at the base of the mountains.

My men were alert, rifles ready. They spread out in a skirmish line, not sure what was going on in this dismal little place, but ready for anything, keeping their distance from one another, obeying the army axiom that you never bunch up or one round will get you all.

The men putting the body on the pile had not seen or heard us. We were on the very edge of the clearing, blending into the jungle behind us. A small hut squatted on the far side, a fire burning in a pit in front of the door. It was thatch, probably built in a hurry, no aesthetic value to it, simply utilitarian. A wooden totem, about four feet high, stood next to the door. I recognized it as the art of one of the hill tribes.

I called to the white men. “Hey.”

They stopped in their tracks, turned, squinted at my team.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We’re Americans, First Cav. Who’re you guys?”

“Special Forces. What’s going on here?” I said.

“Just a little cleanup. Getting rid of some gooks.”

“I’m Lieutenant Royal. I want your name and rank.”

“Fuck you, Loot. I’m Major Harding and this is Sergeant Dill.”

“Okay, Major. I need to see some identification. Sir.”

“Tell your men to stand down, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir. No can do. Let me see that ID.”

He came toward me, a slight smile on his face. He pulled a wallet from the pocket of his shorts, extracted a military ID card, and handed it to me. He backed off a couple of steps, watched me look at the card. He was indeed Major John Harding, Infantry, U.S. Army. I snapped to attention.

“Back your men down, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Sorry, sir. Not until I know what’s going on here.”

He spit into the dirt. “We’re killing these little bastards and letting their bodies rot in the sun.”

“Sir,” I said, “did you kill the children and old people too?”

“Bet your ass, boy.” He turned to the sergeant, who was ten feet behind him. “Tell ’em, Dill. Ain’t none of these gook kids going to grow up and kill Americans.”

“Where’re your weapons?” I asked. I had relaxed back into a loose posture, standing at ease, my rifle at the ready.

The sergeant pointed. “Over in the hut. We’re taking care of them with knives. Scares the shit out of them.”

“This on your orders, Major?”

“That’s right, son. My orders. Me and old Dill here been taking the slopes out one at a time.”

I wanted to kill the bastard. This was the evil I’d heard about in church, read about in the history books. It was strange. The major looked ordinary, like any other middle-aged soldier, dirty, ragged around the edges, a slight stubble on his chin. Yet he was killing without distinction, without remorse, with glee even. My finger tightened on the trigger, but in the end I couldn’t do it. I would be a murderer, better only by degrees than this demented officer.

I saw Sergeant Dill in the background, his face stony, eyes squinting in the bright light.

I trained my rifle on the major. “Sir, you’re under arrest.”

He laughed. “Look, you little shit, I was in this man’s army when you were in diapers. You aren’t arresting anybody.”

My voice was hard, not that of a nineteen-year-old, but of a weary soldier who’d seen too much death, too much fear, a teenager who would never be young again. “Keep your hands where I can see them, sir.”

I called to one of my men, a boy named Tommy Abernathy, to disarm the major and restrain him. We would take him back with us to face military justice.

“Wait,” Harding said, as Abernathy approached. “Stand at attention, soldier. You men, put your weapons down. I’m taking command here. I’m senior.”

Abernathy kept moving toward the major. My other men didn’t move. We stood there, staring, men weary of death and of killing and of jungles. Men who asked only that they be allowed to get home alive. And the two jackasses who seemed to enjoy killing.

Abernathy was within a couple of steps of the officer when Harding pulled his bloody knife from the sheath at his belt and stabbed Abernathy in the heart. I didn’t think, didn’t reason, didn’t hesitate. I shot the major in the head, right above his left ear. He went forward, face into the dirt, no attempt to catch himself.

I saw Dill move, his hand coming from his back pocket, a .45-caliber semiautomatic in it. He was raising the barrel, pointing my way. I shot him in the chest. I saw surprise cross his face for an instant before it went blank with death. He was falling backward, limp as a noodle. He hit the ground hard, stirring up little clouds of dust. I heard the sound of my shots reverberate off the jungle canopy.

Jimbo Merryman, my top sergeant and the best soldier I ever knew, moved quickly behind me. I reached Tommy, felt for a pulse in his neck, looked up at Jimbo and shook my head. Abernathy was dead. He was nineteen years old, my age.

He was from Rochelle, Illinois, and had a girl waiting there for him, his high school sweetheart. I’d seen her picture many times, a sweet-eyed brown-haired girl in a portrait that must have been her high school graduation photo.

Abernathy was the son of a minister, a boy who grew up in the church, believing in God and in good and evil, redemption and forgiveness. He’d joined the army to prove himself and he’d done that over and over. He’d been a good soldier who planned to go home, marry his girl, and study to become a preacher like his dad. He was a gentle soul who had become a fierce warrior, a man who wanted little out of life other than his girl and the children they would produce and a chance to preach the gospel and tend to his flock of believers.

“L.T.,” said Jimbo, using the nickname the soldiers had for young lieutenants, “I don’t think these guys are dead.” He shot the dead major and then went to the sergeant’s body and shot him in the chest. One by one, each of my men, all twelve of them followed Jimbo, each taking a shot at the two dead men.

Jimbo turned around and loud enough for us all to hear. “I don’t guess we’ll ever figure out whose round actually killed these bastards.” The men grunted in agreement.

We walked to the other edge of the clearing. There were five people still alive, all tied to trees, waiting like staked goats for their executioners. They began to moan as we approached. Jimbo, who spoke a little of their language, talked quietly, explaining that they were free to take care of their dead and to go home. We cut them loose and walked on into the jungle, headed for the base camp, carrying Tommy Abernathy’s body on a makeshift stretcher.

I never did know who those American soldiers were. They were rogues, dangerous men who spit in the eye of every American serviceman who served with honor and decency. And almost all of them did. These two were aberrations. They liked the killing, the fear they saw in the eyes of their victims. They were serial killers with a key to the candy store. They killed with impunity, and enjoyed doing it

I had seen evil, perhaps for the first time in my life. I was never exposed to anything like that again, but now I knew it existed, that evil traipsed through our world, often with impunity, always ready in its maleficence to do harm to those least expecting it. Because evil is a coward, preying on the weak, the uninformed, the sunny people who go through life not believing in it. But the monster is always with us, searching out the weaknesses in others, preying on those least ready to defend themselves, the weak, the ignorant, the optimist who denies evil’s very existence and is thus never ready to confront this terrible malignancy, this frightful malefactor.

There is that old conundrum that poses the question of what if someone had killed Adolf Hitler in 1933, and thus saved the lives of millions of people. Would the killer have been justified? Of course, that begs the question. One has to make decisions based on the evidence available at the time the decision is made. If I’d known that the major was going to kill Abernathy, I would have been justified in killing him, a preemptive strike to save a man who had entrusted his life to me. On the other hand, Hitler’s putative 1933 killer could not have known what the future would bring anymore than I could have discerned the major’s intention to kill Abernathy. Can we decide morality retrospectively based on facts that come to light after the completion of the act under consideration? Suppose I’d shot the major before ordering Abernathy to disarm him, and it turned out that
the man had no intention of harming my soldier? I’d never know the answer to that, since I’d killed the only person who could have told me. Likewise, I could not have foreseen the actions that the major did take, because they were acts of a deranged man. He must have known that if he drew his knife, I would shoot him.

So on a soft spring evening beside a placid Gulf of Mexico, when the stars peeked through the open sunroof, I thought of good and evil and of the choices we make. If I’d followed my first inclination and shot the major on that hot day, Abernathy might still be alive somewhere in the Midwest, loving his girl, raising his children, giving solace to his parishioners. I would still be a murderer, but would that have put me into the same category as the major?

If I’d shot him, I would never have known his intention to kill Abernathy. Thus, I would have been the murderer, one without justification for the act. Can one evoke good by doing evil, by committing murder? Had I pulled the trigger, Abernathy would not have been killed, but a part of me would have died in that jungle, the part that I hold onto with such zeal, the core that I like to think is good and decent, even when I respond in ways that call that into question.

The wheels always turn, round and round, questions of moral judgment that are beyond my ability to answer. Still, I’d always wished I had just shot the bastard.