Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  The kids were his own age, some younger, with a few middle-aged men hanging around with that intense, long-haired look that the DC crowd so liked. Judging from the hair, only he and Crowe represented the United States Marines, though Crowe was far from an ambassador. He was telling some people a familiar story of how he almost got out of the draft by playing psycho at his physical.

  “I’m nude,” he was saying, “except for this cowboy hat. I’m very polite and everybody’s very polite to me at first. I do everything they ask me to do. I bend and spread, I carry my underwear in a little bag, I smile and call everybody sir. I just won’t take off my cowboy hat. ‘Uh, son, would you mind taking off that hat?’ ‘I can’t,’ I explain. ‘I’ll die if I take off my cowboy hat.’ See, the key is to stay polite. If you act nuts they know you’re faking. Pretty soon they got majors and generals and colonels and all screaming at me to take off my cowboy hat. I’m nude in this little room with all these guys, but I will not take off my cowboy hat. What a fuckin’ hero I am! What a John Wayne! They’re screaming and I’m just saying, ‘If I take off my cowboy hat, I’ll die.’ ”

  “So you weren’t drafted?”

  “Well, they kicked me out. It took weeks for the paperwork to catch up, and by that time, my uncle had cut a deal with the Man to get me into a slot in the Marines that wouldn’t rotate to the ’Nam. You know, when this is over, all those charges will be dropped. Nobody will care. We’ll write the whole thing off. That’s why anybody who lets themselves get wasted is a total moron. Like, for what?”

  Good question, Donny wondered. For what? He tried to remember the boys in his platoon in 1/3 Bravo who’d gotten zapped in his seven months with them. It was hard. And who did you count? Did you count the guy who got hit by an Army truck in Saigon? Maybe his number was up. Maybe he would have gotten hit back on the street corner in Sheboygan. Would you count him? Donny didn’t know.

  But you definitely had to count the kid—what was his name? what was his name?—who stepped on a Betty and got his chest shredded. That was the first one Donny remembered. He was such a new dick then. The guy just lay back. So much blood. People gathered around him, exactly in the way you weren’t supposed to, and he seemed remarkably calm before he died. But nobody read any letter home to Mom afterward in which he told everybody how great the platoon was and how they were fighting for democracy. They just zipped him up and left him. He remembered the face, not the name. A sort of porky kid. Pancakey face. Small eyes. Didn’t have to shave. What was his name?

  Another one got hit by a rifle bullet. He screamed and bucked and yelled and nobody could quiet him. He seemed so indignant. It was so unfair! Well, it was unfair. Why me, he seemed to be asking his friends, why not you? He was thin and rangy, from Spokane. Didn’t talk much. Always kept his rifle clean. Was bowlegged. What was his name? Donny didn’t remember.

  There were a few more, but nothing much. Donny hadn’t fought in any big battles or taken part in any big operations with dramatic code names that made the news. Mostly it was walking, scared every day you’d get jumped or you’d trip something off, or you’d just collapse under the weight of it. So much of it was boring, so much of it was dirty, so much of it was debasing. He didn’t want to go back. He knew that. Man, if you let them send you back at this late date, when units were being rotated back to the world all the time during “Vietnamization,” and you got wasted, you were a moron.

  Suddenly someone bumped him hard.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, stepping back.

  “Yeah, you are,” someone said.

  Where had this action come from? There were three of them, but big like he was. Hair pouring from their heads, bright bands around their skulls, dressed in faded jeans and Army fatigue shirts.

  “You’re the Marine asshole, right? The lifer?”

  “I am a Marine,” he said. “And I’m probably an asshole. But I’m not a lifer.”

  The three fixed him with unsteady glares. Their eyes burned with hate. One of them rocked a little, the team leader, with his fist wrapped tightly around the neck of a bottle of gin. He held it like a weapon.

  “Yeah, my brother came back in a little sack because of lifer fucks like you,” he said.

  “I’m very sorry for your brother,” said Donny.

  “Asshole lifer got him greased so he could make lieutenant colonel.”

  “Shit like that happens. Some joker wants a stripe so he sends his guys up the hill. He gets the stripe and they get the plastic bag.”

  “Yeah, but it happens mainly ’cause assholes like you let it happen, ’cause you don’t have the fuckin’ guts to say no to the Man. If you had the guts to say no, the whole thing stops.”

  “Did you say no to the Man?”

  “I didn’t have to,” the boy said proudly. “I was 1-Y. I was out of it.”

  Donny thought about explaining that it didn’t matter what your classification was, if you obeyed it, you were obeying orders and working for the Man. Some guys just got better orders than others. But then the boy took a step toward Donny, his face drunkenly pugnacious. He gripped the bottle even harder.

  “Hey, I didn’t come here to fight,” said Donny. “I just drifted in with some guys.” He looked around to find himself in the center of a circle of staring kids. Even the music had stopped and the smoke had ceased seething in the air. Crowe had, of course, totally disappeared.

  “Well, you drifted into the wrong fucking party, man,” said the boy, and made as if to take another step, as Donny tried to figure out whether to pop him or to cut and run to avoid the hassle.

  But suddenly another figure dipped between them.

  “Whoa,” he said, “my brothers, my brothers, let’s not lose our holy cools.”

  “He’s a fucking—” said the aggressor.

  “He’s another kid; you can’t blame the whole thing on him any more than you can blame it on anyone. It’s the System, don’t you get that? Jesus, don’t you get anything?”

  “Yeah, well, you have to start somewhere.”

  “Jerry, you cool out. Go smoke a joint or something, man. I’m not letting any three guys with booze bottles jump any poor grunt who came by looking to get laid.”

  “Trig, I—”

  But this Trig laid a hand on Jerry’s chest and fixed him with a glare hot enough to melt most things on earth, and Jerry stepped back, swallowed and looked at his pals.

  “Fuck it,” he finally said. “We were splitting anyhow.”

  And the three of them turned and stormed out.

  Suddenly the music started again—Stones, “Satisfaction”—and the party came back to life.

  “Hey, thanks,” said Donny. “The last thing I need is a fight.”

  “That’s okay,” said his new friend. “I’m Trig Carter, by the way.” He put out a hand.

  Trig had one of those long, grave faces, where the bones showed through the tight skin and the eyes seemed to be both moist and hot at the same moment. He really looked a lot like Jesus in a movie. There was something radiant in the way he fixed you with his eyes. He had something rare: immediate likability.

  “Howdy,” Donny said, surprised the grip was so strong in a man so thin. “My name’s Fenn, Donny Fenn.”

  “I know. You’re Crowe’s secret hero. The Bravo.”

  “Oh, Christ. I can’t be a hero to him. I’m in it till my hitch ends, then I’m gone forever back to the land of the cacti and the Navajo.”

  “I’ve been there. Mourning doves, right? Little white birds, dart through the arroyos and the brush, really hard to spot, really fast?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Donny. “My dad and I used to hunt them. You’ve got to use a real light shot, you know, an eight or a nine. Even then, it’s a tough shot.”

  “Sounds like fun,” said Trig. “But in my case I don’t shoot ’em with a gun but with a camera. Then I paint them.”

  “Paint them?” This made no sense to Donny.

  “You know,” Trig said. “Pictures. I’m actuall
y an avian painter. Really, I’ve traveled the world painting pictures of birds.”

  “Wow!” said Donny. “Does it pay?”

  “A little. I illustrated my uncle’s book. He’s Roger Prentiss Fuller, Birds of North America. The Yale zoologist?”

  “Er, can’t say I heard of him.”

  “He was a hunter once. He went on safari in the early fifties with Elmer Keith.”

  This did impress Donny. Keith was a famous Idaho shooter who wrote books like Elmer Keith’s Book of the Sixgun and Elmer Keith on Big Game Rifles.

  “Wow,” he said. “Elmer Keith.”

  “Roger says Keith was a tiny, bitter little man. He had a terrible burn as a kid and he was always compensating for it. They had a falling out. Elmer just wanted to shoot and shoot. He couldn’t see any sense to a limit. Roger doesn’t shoot anymore.”

  “Well, after ’Nam, I don’t think I will either,” Donny said.

  “You sound okay for a Marine, Donny. Crowe was right about you. Maybe you’ll join us when you get out.” He smiled, his eyes lighting like a movie star’s.

  “Well…” Donny said, provisionally. Himself a peacenik, smoking dope, long hair, carrying those cards, chanting “Hell, no, we won’t go”? He laughed at the notion.

  “Trig! When did you get here?” It was Crowe and his crowd, now with girls in tow, all leading what seemed to be a kind of electric ripple toward Trig.

  And in seconds, Trig was gone, borne away on currents of some sort of celebrityhood that Donny didn’t understand.

  He turned to a girl standing nearby.

  “Hey, excuse me,” he said. “Who is this Trig?”

  She looked at him in astonishment.

  “Man, what planet are you from?” she demanded, then ran after Trig, her eyes beaming love.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Trig Carter!” Commander Bonson exclaimed.

  “Yeah, that was it, I couldn’t quite remember the last name,” said Donny, who could remember the name very well but couldn’t quite bring himself to say it out loud. “Seemed like a very nice guy.”

  Bonson’s office was an undistinguished chamber in a World War II-era tempo still standing in the Washington Navy Yard about a half mile from Eighth and I, where by dim pretext Donny had been sent the next day for his debriefing on his first day as spy hunter.

  “You saw Trig Carter and Crowe together. Is that right?”

  Why did Donny feel so sleazy about all this? He felt clammy, as if someone were listening. He looked around. President Nixon glowered down at him from the wall, enjoining him to do his duty for God and Country. A degree from the University of New Hampshire added to the solemnity of the occasion. A few ceremonial photos of Lieutenant Commander Bonson with various dignitaries completed the decor; the room was otherwise completely bereft of personality or even much sense of human occupation. It was preternaturally neat; even the paper clips in the little plastic box had been stacked, not dumped.

  Lieutenant Commander Bonson bent forward, fixing Donny in his dark glare. He was a thin, dark man with a lot of whiskery shadow on his face and a sense of complete focus. There was something pilgrimlike about him; he should have been in a pulpit denouncing miniskirts and the Beatles.

  “Yes, sir,” Donny finally said. “The two of them … and about one hundred other people.”

  “Where was this again?”

  “A party. Uh, on C Street, on the Hill. I didn’t get the address.”

  “Three-forty-five C, Southeast,” said Ensign Weber.

  “Did you check it out, Weber?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s the home of one James K. Phillips, a clerk to Justice Douglas and a homosexual, according to the FBI.”

  “Were most of the people there homosexuals, Fenn? Was it a homo thing?”

  Donny didn’t know what to say. It just seemed like a party in Washington, like any party in Washington, with a lot of young people, some grass, some beer, music, and fun and hope in the air.

  “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

  Bonson sat back, considering. The homosexual thing seemed to hang in his mind, clouding it for a time. But then he was back on the track.

  “So you saw them together?”

  “Well, sir, not together, really. In the same crowd. They knew each other, that was clear. But it didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Could Crowe have given him any deployment intelligence?”

  Donny almost laughed, but Bonson was so set in his glare that he knew to release the pressure he felt building in his chest would have been a big mistake.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that I saw. I mean, does Crowe have any deployment intelligence? I don’t. How would he?”

  But Bonson didn’t answer.

  He turned to Weber.

  “We’ve got to get closer,” he said. “We’ve got to get him inside the cell. Trig Carter. Imagine that.”

  “A wire, sir? Could we wire him?” asked Weber.

  Oh, Christ, thought Donny. I’m really not going anywhere with a tape recorder taped to my belly.

  “No, not unless we could get time to set it up quickly. He’s got to stay fluid, flexible, quick on his feet. The wire won’t work, not under these circumstances.”

  “It was just a suggestion, sir,” said Weber.

  “Well, Fenn,” said Bonson, “you’ve made a fine start. But too many times we see fast starters are slow finishers. You’ve got to really press now. You’ve got to make Crowe your pal, your friend, do you see? He’s got to trust you; that’s how you’ll crack this thing. Trig Carter, Weber. Isn’t that the damndest thing you ever heard?”

  “Sir, if I may ask, who is Trig Carter?”

  “Show him, Weber.”

  Weber looked into a file and slid something over to Donny. Donny recognized it at once: he’d seen it a thousand times probably, without really noticing it. It was just part of the living-room imagery of the war, the scenes that were unforgettable.

  It was a cover of Time magazine late in the hot summer of 1968: Chicago, the Democratic National Convention, the “police riot” outside on the last night. There was Trig, in shirtsleeves, a gush of blood cascading down from an ugly welt in his short, neat hair. He was bent under the weight of another kid he was carrying out of the fog of tear gas and the blurs that were Chicago policemen pounding anything that could be pounded. Trig looked impossibly noble and heroic, impossibly courageous. His eyes were screwed up in the pain of the CS gas, he was bloody and sweaty, and the veins on his neck stood out from all the effort he had invested in carrying the dazed, bloody, traumatized boy out of the zone of violence. He looked like any of a dozen insanely heroic Corpsmen Donny had seen pull the same thing off amid not cops but tracer fire and grenades and Bettys over in the Land of Bad Things, none of whose pictures had ever ended up on the cover of Time magazine.

  THE SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE, said the cover.

  “He’s their Lancelot,” said Weber. “Was beaten up in Selma by the Alabama State Police, got his picture on the cover of Time in sixty-eight at the convention. He’s been everywhere in the Movement since then. One of the early peace freaks, a rich kid from an old Maryland family. Just came back from a year in England, studying drawing at Oxford. Harvard grad, some kind of painter, isn’t that it?”

  “Avian painter, sir. That’s what he told me.”

  “Yes. Birds. Loves birds. Very odd,” said Bonson.

  “Very smart boy,” continued Weber. “But then, that seems to be the profile. It was the profile in England, too. The smart ones, they can figure everything out, see through everything. They’ll be the elite after the revolution. Anyhow, he’s big in the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, a kind of glamorous roving ambassador and organizer. Lives here in DC, but works the campus circuit, goes where the action is. The FBI’s been monitoring him for years. He’d be exactly the kind of man who’d get to Crowe and turn him into a spy. He’d be perfect. He’s exactly who we’re looking for.”

  �
��Fenn, I can’t emphasize this enough. You’ve got less than two weeks until the big raft of May Day demonstrations is set. Crowe will be pressed to uncover deployment intelligence, Carter will be on him for results. You’ve got to monitor them very carefully. If you can’t get tape or photos, you may have to testify in open court against them.”

  Donny felt a cold stone drop in his stomach: he saw an image, himself on the stand, putting the collar on poor Crowe. It made him sick.

  “I know you’ll make a fine witness,” Bonson was saying. “So begin to discipline your mind: remember details, events, chronologies. You might write a coded journal so you can recall things. Remember exact sentences. Get in the habit of making a time check every few minutes. If you don’t want to take notes, imagine taking notes, because that can fix things in your mind. This is very important work, do you understand?”

  “Ah—”

  “Doubts? Do I see doubts? You cannot doubt.” Bonson leaned forward until he and he alone filled the world. “Just as you could have no doubters in a rifle platoon, you can have no doubters on a counter intelligence mission. You have to be on the team, committed to the team. The doubts erode your discipline, cloud your judgment, destroy your memory, Fenn. No doubts. That’s the kind of rigor I need from you.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Donny, hating himself as the world’s entire melancholy weight settled on his strong young shoulders.

  Crowe was particularly derelict that afternoon in riot control drill.

  “It’s so hot, Donny. The mask! Can’t we pretend we’re wearing our masks?”

  “Crowe, if you have to do it for real, you’ll want to be wearing a mask because otherwise the CS will make you a crybaby in a second. Put the mask on with the other guys.”

  Muttering darkly, Crowe slid the mask over his head, then clapped his two-pound camouflaged steel pot over his skull.

  “Squad, on my command, form up!” shouted Donny, watching as his casket team, plus assorted others from Bravo Company assigned riot duty in Third Squad, formed a line. They looked like an insect army: their eyes hidden behind the plastic lenses of the masks, their faces made insectoid and ominous by the mandiblelike filter can, all in Marine green, with their 782 gear, their pistols, their M14s held at the high port.