Tomahawk (40 page)

Deborah said, “Leave him alone. He's a friend of ours.”

When the food was on the table, they joined hands. Haneghen said the Lord's Prayer. Some joined him in English, others in soft Spanish. They sat, and hands reached out for serving plates. Then Haneghen cleared his throat.

“Before we eat. We have a guest here—in fact, we have several guests. Welcome to our table. But I want to remember somebody who's not here.”

A child screamed from upstairs; the old man whispered unendingly to himself as Haneghen took a tortilla from the stack, paused, then tore it apart with his fingers. Taking a piece for himself, he passed one half to his left, the other to his right. He said softly, “This is in memory of those who sacrifice themselves in the name of God.”

Next he took a pitcher of juice and said, “This is for
those who work in the name of peace, and love for their neighbor.”

When it reached him, Dan tore a piece from the hot tortilla and laid it on his plate. Then he put his hand over his eyes for a while, till he was able to eat.

He was saying his good nights when Haneghen came out. “Can we talk for a second before you go?”

“Sure.”

“On the porch?”

An errant wind drove dead leaves past like cats' claws scratching down the cracked, empty pavement. Dan caught the distant crackle of shots. It was still going on, the war that was being fought every night on the streets of every city in America.

“I'm going to be leaving soon,” Haneghen said. “And somehow I don't think you're going to be coming around very often anymore. So maybe we should say good-bye now.”

“Relatives? Change of scene?”

“Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.” In the light from within, he could just make out Haneghen's grin. “Minimum security, but it's still a penitentiary.”

Dan didn't know what to say. His first impulse was to congratulate him, since it seemed to be something he'd wanted. Or had at least invited, over and over. Instead, he muttered, “How long did they give you?”

“Eight years. I have previous offenses.”

“Eight years …”

“She was spared that, Dan. At least.”

“We discussed it. I told her I'd wait.”

“Did you? I thought you might. I knew she was moving away from us, toward something else.” He looked out over the darkened grounds of the old soldiers' home, and they both listened to a siren rise slowly and then fall. “But I'm not worried about her. Whatever happens after this life, she's going to be one of the … I hesitate to use the word
elect,
that sounds so theological Anyway, I'm not worried about her. I'm worried about you.”

Dan didn't answer. Haneghen said gently, “How
about
you? What are you feeling about this?”

“I feel like killing whoever killed her. That's how I feel.”

“Would it change anything?”

“It would feel right.”

“You know what might be a better response? Praying for whoever did it.”

“What? Fuck that. Fuck
them.”

“Revenge doesn't change a thing. She'd be the first to tell you that.”

Dan clenched the porch railing, so angry that he had to hold it tightly to keep from striking the pale face next to him.

“Thinking about it?”

“Yeah, I'm thinking. I've heard that before. It appealed to me.”

“I thought it did.”

“But I'm starting to see where it's selective or something—that some hearts will change and others won't, or can't…. Whoever killed her, did it make any difference to him what she believed, how good she was? It didn't make any difference! Did it?”

“Sometimes it does.”

“But only if the other person's already halfway, if there's already some enlightenment, or faith, or compassion. If there isn't, all you're doing is delivering the innocent up to evil.”

“That's not our judgment to make.”

“What if they catch them? What do you think should happen?”

“What do
you
think should happen?”

“Me? I think they ought to be tortured, then killed. We don't need them around.”

“That's another judgment we don't have any right to make,” Haneghen told him. “Have you sat with a condemned man in the last hour of his life? I have. He's no different from us. We can't give life. Therefore, we have no right to take it.”

Dan stood looking out over the city. Bitterer words than he'd ever spoken came to his lips, quivered there like bubbles, then subsided. He took a deep breath, then another.

He said, “I don't think we can agree, Carl. But I appreciate you making the … offering for her. In there.”

“We both loved her, Dan.” Something moved in the darkness, and he found himself holding Haneghen's hand.

When he got to Lee Highway, the place he remembered seeing there was still open. A White Tower burger joint was next to it, and a bar. Men stood under the neon arguing and drinking from brown paper bags. He looked at the sign for a moment—NATIONAL PAWN, INSTANT CASH FOR ANY ARTICLE OF VALUE—then pushed the door open.

The clerk at the counter tried to sell him a revolver. He said they were safer, easier to clean, and less complicated to use under stress. Dan said he was used to automatics. He eyed the big Colts and Berettas, but suspected a full-size gun would bulge even under winter clothes. Finally he settled on a smaller, lighter one, a 9-mm automatic. He had to sign a form saying he wasn't a felon or a drug addict. With a box of hollow-points and the tax, it came to $196.

23

 

 

 

When he reported back in, Vic and Sparky were already at their desks. They said, “Hi.” He muttered something and sat down, not returning their uneasy glances.

His desktop was covered to a depth of several inches, and his in-box had obviously toppled over and been re-stacked. One huge box crouched on top of everything. Except that perched on top of
it
was an envelope with his name in a feminine hand.

The card was signed by everybody in the office. Some he didn't know well, and some were people he didn't really get along with. But their signatures were there, too, each with a word of condolence. He tossed it in the drawer.

“Sparky. Sparky!”

“Yeah!”

“What is all this shit? What's this box?”

“Uh, I was going to start on that if you didn't come in today. It's the prelim drafts of the tech manuals for handling, quality assurance, and inspection. Twenty-one volumes. They want our comments by the end of the month.”

“How's it look on
New Jersey?
We gonna have her ready for deployment?”

“That depends on how you define ‘ready.' “

“Okay, talk to me.” He leaned back, trying to forget for a few seconds that he'd lost everything that mattered in the world.

The advanced analysis class was much smaller than the introductory one had been. He took a seat in back, making sure everyone saw him. He called to Cottrell, “Hey, Sandy?”

“What?”

“Thanks for the call back on the subcommittee thing. Hey, where's Mei?”

She looked away coldly. “I don't know. I haven't seen her for two or three weeks now.”

A clearing of the throat, and Szerenci came in, looking testy. Seeing Dan, he said, “Ah, back from Canada. Did it fly?”

“Seven out of eight:”

“Expect a much lower P-sub-S on a battlefield. How's your pacifist friend?”

He dropped his eyes and didn't answer. Szerenci shrugged off his coat and searched for the chalk. “Okay, let's get started.”

He launched into a lecture on guerrilla warfare. Dan's hand noted each point without hearing it. He was remembering when Kerry had told Szerenci off at his party. How old-maidish he'd been, flinching when Evans had called her “dangerous,” worrying every time he saw an activist and a military type in speaking distance. But, at the same time, how proud he'd been of her. His hand started to shake and he had to take a couple of deep breaths.

“Now for some numbers. There have been between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred and fifty wars since the end of World War Two. About two-thirds of those qualify as unconventional wars. Beyond that, or below that on the spectrum of violence, lies the area of even less conventional resistance, which we call ‘terrorism.'

“Unless, of course, our guys are doing it. Then they're ‘freedom fighters.' But usually it's aimed against us. Why? It's the penalty of power: that when resistance is impossible by conventional armed force, it's transformed into terrorism.

“Example. You all heard this weekend about the bombing of a shopping mall at an Army base in Germany. Twenty-eight deaths. We're not sure yet who's responsible. But, assuming we can find out, what can we
do about it? What sort of counterstrike can we make without doing exactly what they want us to, injuring innocent people, turning world opinion against us? Do we have to put Americans on the ground, nose-to-nose, with a body count to match? There are those who think
that's
going to be the face of war in the next century.”

Dan took notes automatically. He wasn't thinking about terrorism. He was still seeing her smile, and still remembering her face.

Later that night, he stood at the top of the steps that led down to the towpath, the gun heavy under his jacket. Around him the copper-colored lights of the Key Bridge lit every detail of crumbling concrete, drifted trash, naked treetops.

He'd left Szerenci's class at the break, while they still had an hour to go, strolling away as if to the Coke machine. He figured at least half of the class would be willing to say he'd been there the whole period.

He'd never done anything like this before. Just carrying a concealed weapon in the District of Columbia was a major offense. Not that that kept the criminals from doing it…. Above him, the stars were gone, blotted out. To the north, the overcast sky pulsated with saffron light. Behind him, the skyscrapers of Rosslyn glittered like a miniature Manhattan.

But down there on the path, beside the canal, was only one vast pool of darkness.

He unzipped his jacket experimentally. His glove caught in it and he fumbled, jammed it. Crap, that wasn't going to work. He'd better just jerk his jacket up with his left hand and go for the gun with his right.

He stood above the blackness as he'd once stood suspended above the screaming, lightless chaos of an Arctic sea. His heart pounded. His kidneys hurt.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he went quickly down, steps scraping in the enclosed stairway, and emerged onto the towpath.

Down here the hill and the mass of the trees, bare of leaves but still dense, absorbing light, covered him and everything around him with impenetrable shadow. Fight-
ing the impulse to turn and run, he stepped out. He was wearing his shipboard steel-toes, jeans, and a flannel shirt, as well as a sweater and then a padded jacket over that. A dark blue wool watch cap was pulled down over his ears. He had gloves on, but they weren't heavy enough. His hands were tingling. His face and nose hurt. He ignored this. He stood in the center of the path, swiveling his head from side to side, and slowly the darkness became transparent and lighter shadows seemed to move toward him through the gloom.

The towpath was deserted. Its slaty gray curved away alongside the utter black of the icy canal. The wind was a faint cold breath in his face.

Once again, he debated turning back. In some basic and fatal sense, he stood at the brink of traducing everything he'd once believed.

What would she say? What would she think, seeing him here?

Then he thought, It doesn't matter what she'd think. This is what I have to do, in order to live with her memory.

Looking over his shoulder, he started down the path. His boots crunched on frozen gravel. Too fast, too fast. He forced himself into a saunter. He kept turning around, feeling as if his back was naked.

He couldn't help wondering if she
did
see him somehow. The wind in the treetops reminded him of that Halloween. Of the time when—what had those drunken idiots been talking about on the bridge?—when spirits came. Could it be possible, that they lived on? Judged, or punished … but still an individual, still recognizably you? He'd believed that once, with all the simple faith of a childish heart. In that case, he might see her again. In some future life …