Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  That wasn’t what his father had started to say and they both knew it. Patrick admired the ease with which his father could size up a situation and respond to it in the best way possible, maintaining the advantage at all times.

  “There was nothing anybody could do about anything over there,” Patrick said shortly. He stood up with a surge of restless energy. He turned, scanned the large room with the unusually high ceiling, the dark stained-glass window set into the paneled wall. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his fatigues and stared at the window. “I never could figure who that was supposed to be,” he said. “When I was a little kid, I used to think it was Grandpa, then I used to think it was the devil. I remember once Grandma Crowley told me it was Saint John of the Cross.”

  His father’s laugh filled the room with a harsh staccato. “I think the first two would hit the mark. I wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to have himself mounted in glass. He was a corker all right. Christ, Patrick,” his father said, “I think the old man would have given the last ten years of his life for the sight of you right now.”

  When Patrick turned and faced his father, he was unprepared for the open expression of relaxed and genuine pleasure with which his father regarded him.

  “I’m glad you’re home, kid. I’m really glad you’re home.” Then, unable to go any further, his father stood up, winked, held his drink toward the window and said in a sharp, tough voice, “I’ll drink his welcome home for you, Pat, my lad.”

  His mother stood in the doorway, small hands on her apron, and said softly, “Well, if you’ve finished with your drink, the roast is just about ready.”

  Neither Patrick O’Malley nor any of his friends had ever had any real commitment toward the war. Patrick went because it was his war and his turn to be part of it. His father had had a war; his older cousins had Korea; Viet Nam was his turn.

  His friends decided, over beer or a shot of whiskey, that this one was there for them. None of them knew too much about what was involved politically or militaristically or morally or immorally. They knew they were for it and felt superior to those opposed.

  They knew, had been taught, believed, that a carefully drawn world-wide pattern existed; their teachers at St. Thomas Aquinas had taught them what to look for; even at St. John’s it was pointed out to them. Communism was slipping its strangle hold on the free world. It was up to them.

  They sat one night, a bunch of them, spoke vaguely. Except for Tommy Noonan. Over a fourth shot of whiskey, Noonan said bluntly, “My father. My fuck-up war-hero sonuvabitching father. Isn’t that what the hell it’s all about, Patrick? I mean, ultimately, when we analyze it and get to the ultimate stinking bottom of it, isn’t that why we’re enlisting, you and me and Sullivan and Flynn and some of the others? Aren’t we trying to prove we’re as good as the old man? But I think, actually, you know, it’s a pretty shitty war they’ve given us. I mean, hell, their war was all big deal and gung ho and all that ‘we’re in it together’ stuff.” Tommy Noonan swallowed the shot and said thickly, “I think, my friend Patrick, that you and me and the rest of us are getting a bit of a royal screwing in our particular war, just to prove to our fathers that we got balls too. But what the hell, initiation rites, as the primitives would say, right, O’Malley?”

  Tommy Noonan had both of his legs shot off by a gunner in an American helicopter in one of the unfortunate accidents of war which had caused the serious wounding of seven other Americans besides Noonan. He and Tommy Noonan had gone through grade school, high school and a year and a half of college together. They enlisted in the Army together, along with a somewhat reluctant Tom Sullivan, who thought the Marines had better-looking uniforms.

  Sullivan ended up in ordnance and spent most of his time in Thailand. Tommy Noonan was assigned to the Corps of Engineers, spent his time building, destroying and rebuilding landing strips for supply planes.

  Patrick O’Malley, through no fault, desire or understanding of his own, ended up as a medic. He did not see Tommy Noonan after he was shot up. He was in the field with Pfc. Dudley Kenyon, picking over what was left of a detachment of men who had been sent in to capture a small rise of land known on their maps as Hill 202.

  He and Kenyon eyed each other warily. Kenyon, truly dark enough to be called black, rested his hand lightly on his huge Afro, patted at it, pursed his heavy lips, nodded at the tall blond kid with the pale face. He could see the kid hadn’t been at it very long but he could also see he wasn’t ass-brand-new. There were a few facial muscles set in place so he knew the kid wouldn’t come apart at the first piece of meat they stumbled over, but the kid looked soft enough so that Kenyon hoped they wouldn’t find any bits and pieces of his friends or buddies out there.

  Patrick O’Malley let Kenyon take the lead with a grave respect which Kenyon noticed and liked. It wasn’t deference or any of the phony shit some of the whiteys displayed to let you know they considered you their equal, which was shit in and of itself. It was a smart move on the kid’s part and showed a healthy regard for his own skin, to let the more experienced man know, right at the start, that he was the boss.

  Kenyon stood over an inert, groaning figure, leaned forward just slightly to listen for a particular sound. He nodded once briskly and motioned Patrick away.

  “That man is two breaths away from dead,” Dudley Kenyon said, “and we ain’t got nothin’ to waste on a dead man.”

  Patrick glanced back once as they walked away, heard a harsh, sibilant sigh, saw the body arch and hold rigid for an instant, then go limp.

  Kenyon knelt beside a bleeding man whose face was hidden against his buddy, who cradled him.

  “He got it in the stomach,” the soldier said. His voice was hollow, empty; he hugged the wounded man’s head as though it were a pillow.

  “Lemme have a look at his face, man, you like to smother him,” Kenyon said. He put his hand under the wounded man’s chin, jerked his face abruptly. “Hey, man, you with us or you out yonder or what?”

  Kenyon gestured impatiently at Patrick for a needle. “Hey, what color your eyes, soldier? Your face sure one helluva gray color. You got eyes to match or what? Come on, open up and show me.”

  The lids fluttered; the eyes were glazed and unfocused.

  “Where’s your buddy from, soldier?” Kenyon asked.

  “He’s from Tennessee.”

  Kenyon gave a deep growl from his chest. “You from Tennessee, white boy? Well, now ain’t that something interesting. My old papa, he was from Tennessee. Buncha them old sheet-wearing night riders, they come and they took my old pap away one night and we never seen him since.” Kenyon leaned close to the wounded man’s face and whispered menacingly, “What part of Tennessee you say you was from, whitey?”

  The wounded man gasped; his eyes flew open; he stared in terror at the black face which bore down on him. “I didn’t do nothin’ to your pa. I ain’t got nothin’ against any you Nigras, you could askt anybody, I got lotsa Nigra friends.”

  Kenyon squatted back on his heels, cleaned a spot for an injection and grabbed the man’s arm. He grinned and said, “Well, you just gave yourself a nice good jolt of adrenalin, boy. You gonna be just fine, once I get this nice mama needle into you. You gonna feel so good that hole in your gut not gonna hurt you one bit.”

  Kenyon ripped torn clothing away, dug into his kit, cleaned the wound, applied a dressing. He signaled for two stretcher-bearers, and as they carried the wounded man down the hill, Kenyon said to Patrick, “Sometimes you gotta jolt ’em a bit to see if they got anything left. What you do is, you ask some bleeding black man, ‘Ain’t you the nigger fucked my sister back home in Detroit city?’ I guarantee you’ll see an almost dead man come back to life, he got anything left in him at all.”

  Before he joined the Army, the only black person Patrick O’Malley had ever had contact with was the overweight son of a wealthy physician. He was a beige color, with thick pale lips, tightly kinked hair neatly cropped to his skull, and strange light-gray eyes. H
e had the unfortunate name of Jeremiah J. O’Hara III. He was in all of Patrick’s classes at St. Thomas Aquinas, from freshman year through graduation.

  The novelty of a black classmate with the unlikely Irish name of O’Hara was good for laughs when things were dull, but Jeremiah O’Hara didn’t make a good scapegoat. He had a naturally easy manner, a long-suffering attitude of one who was tired of waiting for an original joke at his expense. He was also richer than practically anyone else at school, got higher grades and had every intention of attending, first, Harvard, then Harvard Law.

  Dudley Kenyon was black in a way that Jeremiah O’Hara could never be. He surrounded himself with a conscious racial tension for it had been just such racial tension which had directed his entire life.

  But in his work, which was the saving of life, Kenyon displayed a complete lack of awareness of color.

  It was condition that spoke to him and he taught Patrick to disregard everything but the possibility of survival when selecting who to attend first.

  The dead would wait forever and the dying would die.

  It was the living you tried to save.

  It became almost a contest, a point of pride at selecting those who could make it and leaving the others for later.

  Patrick felt a tough satisfaction when Kenyon would turn to him and say, “Yeah, okay, he looks good,” meaning some writhing bloody form who Patrick had decided stood a chance. “Only the winners, man, we pick only the winners.”

  When they were away from it for a week, moved back from the lines for a few days of rest, it hit Patrick: what they had been doing.

  It hit him with the force of doom and instinctively he sought relief as he had been taught from childhood: he found a priest.

  He was a Navy priest, young, smooth-cheeked, with longish sideburns. He apologized for not being an Army priest, laughed to put Patrick at ease, assured him he was a genuine chaplain; despite his apparent youth, he’d been in Nam on and off for nearly five years.

  It was hard to put it into words, the sense of what he had been doing. It was as though he’d been playing God. The selection of who would live and who would die overwhelmed him. Faces were beginning to haunt him, to accuse him. Young boys covered with their own blood and excrement, lying in a tangle of torn flesh, with nothing human left but a strangulated cry for help, confronted him.

  “I might have helped some of them. God, at least I might have eased some of their agony a little.”

  The priest—Patrick never caught his name; it was something long and Polish or Ukrainian, though he spoke with an irritating Midwestern drawl—wrapped his long hands around his bent knee, dug his heel into the rung of his chair for greater comfort. His face was serious and pensive and he frowned, almost as though to impress Patrick that he was giving a great deal of thought and consideration to the matter.

  After a long silence, the priest coughed slightly, blinked, released his knee and told Patrick about how things are in wartime: choices have to he made sometimes. He was sure that Patrick was doing the best he could under very terrible circumstances and he would pray for Patrick and for all of the poor boys he had had, of necessity, to pass by.

  He told Patrick that he should make the most of his short leave, try to refresh his spirit, forget for the moment the honor he had so shortly left behind and so shortly would again encounter.

  Patrick O’Malley stood up slowly and smiled his blazing boyish smile so earnestly that the priest felt the warm glow of his own comforting powers. He stood up to take the offered hand with hearty fellowship.

  “Gee, Father, thanks. Thanks very much. Boy, you sure made me feel better. I mean, I felt pretty bad when I came in here to talk to you, but just listening to you made me feel a hundred per cent better.”

  “Well,” the priest said, flushed with pleasure, “that’s what we’re here for, that’s what we’re here for.”

  “Yeah, Father,” Patrick said, “you made me feel so goddamn fucking good that I’m going out to the boondocks and screw at least six little slant-eyed whores.”

  For just one instant, the priest’s hand held in his, continued pumping, until the sense of what Patrick said caused the priest to yank his hand away.

  “What...what?”

  “And I’ll think of you at the very minute I shove it in, Father.”

  Patrick left the chaplain’s office and headed for the bar run by an old Japanese man and his two sons. It was where Dudley Kenyon hung out.

  The day that Patrick saved Kenyon’s life was the day that Kenyon told him about the five men he’d stalked and murdered.

  They were loading the wounded, tied securely to their stretchers, flattened by the protective tarpaulin so that they all looked like cardboard corpses. The heavy blade whirred above their heads, the force of artificial wind prickled along Patrick’s scalp, seemed to draw him upward, wanted to suck him into the heart of the machine. The proximity of the invisibly whirling blades was something he could never get used to. The rhythm ran through him as he raised and balanced and handed off the wounded: ma-chete; ma-chete; machete.

  The last boy lay patiently waiting, lit cigarette dangling from his lips. Patrick squatted beside him, sniffed and grinned.

  “Man, where’d you get that stuff from? From my buddy over there?”

  The soldier inhaled, moved his head slightly to indicate that Patrick should take a drag. The sweet familiar odor came slowly in lazy billows from the soldier’s mouth. Patrick grinned and inhaled elaborately, then replaced the reefer in the soldier’s mouth.

  “Sure makes the trip a little easier to take.”

  Kenyon came over, helped himself to a drag, gave the wounded soldier the last. “This here mother got it made, O’Malley. He got himself a few little toes knocked off his goddamn foot and home again, home again.”

  “I don’t know, man, I don’t know.” The soldier’s voice was thin and far away. “That’s what you tell me, brother. But how come I don’t like feel nothin’? Don’t feel fucking nothin’ nowhere, like I don’t exist no more.”

  Patrick caught some quick signal from Kenyon and he realized that this was the kid with the severed spinal cord. He said quietly, “That’s ’cause my man here gave you some real a-one special-stock pot like no other shit you ever had.”

  The soldiers eyes rolled slowly from Patrick to Kenyon and he tried a lazy, heavy smile. “Hey, man, this little whitey boy talk like he soul.”

  Kenyon flung an arm around Patrick’s shoulder, wrapped an arm around his neck in a rough, scraping embrace. “He been hangin’ around so long with the brothers, he beginning to talk and walk and roll like soul.”

  Patrick felt unaccountably happy and relaxed. At a signal, he lifted his end of the stretcher, the head end, lightly and with ease. Kenyon backed up the slight incline and couldn’t see what was happening behind him.

  Patrick, who did see, couldn’t immediately calculate the effect of what he saw, not consciously. Some other, knowing part of himself took over, reacted, dropped the stretcher without thought as he heard the scream of fear from the stretcher. The cold death blade bore down on them. Patrick absorbed only that the helicopter had tipped, slanted, angled into them and Kenyon’s head was inches from decapitation.

  He lurched, threw himself at Kenyon, knocked him to the hard ground, felt his heavy booted foot smash against the man on the stretcher, felt his arm smash into Kenyon’s throat. They rolled together along the ground beneath the terrible gaping hole of the helicopter.

  The wounded and their tenders had been dumped indiscriminately, sprayed out in various positions, heads twisted, faces pressed down into earth. The wounded cried out; the corpsmen, wounded now themselves, cried out. Two airmen, stunned, insensible, clutched at each other, pulled at each other. They had one moment been safely inside the body of their ’copter and the next moment, unknowingly, they pulled themselves upright, directly into the irrevocable cutting edge, were dismembered, their flesh tossed in wild unbelievable disarray all over the area, before
the pilot, knocked from his seat, was able to cut the engine.

  How the accident had happened, why, what caused the solidly resting machine to lurch, was really academic. The damage was estimated and the number of dead attributed to the accident was reduced to the two airmen. It was figured that the three wounded who succumbed when unceremoniously tossed from their safe berth would have died anyway.

  The kid with the severed spinal cord wasn’t injured further by the accident but he kept whispering over and over again, “Hey, how come I don’t feel nothin’? How come?”

  Later, Kenyon held Patrick by both shoulders and studied him intently. Patrick noticed that the black face had gone paler, a strange yellow crept along Kenyon’s cheeks and around his mouth.

  In an exaggerated slurring, Patrick said to him, “Why, man, I just done like I been taught to do. I just picked out the mother who looked to me like he had the best chance.”

  Kenyon laughed then and called him a few obscene names, and they boxed and tussled wildly and lit a joint and shared it. Later, that night, when things had calmed down and neither one of them could sleep, Kenyon told him about the five men he had murdered. From his old unit, before he’d become a medic.

  “You see,” Kenyon said, “them five mother fuckers killed like forty-five unarmed civilians. They was all them little skinny old ladies you see along the road sometimes, you know, who run and hide the minute they see us comin’.

  “We was out on patrol lookin’ to contact an advance unit. We come upon a passel of dead Marines and nobody knew who the Christ they was or what they was doin’ up there. This lieutenant, he was one mean sonuvabitch bastard, a short, little round-belly guy. Shit, he always had that scared look on him, like, man, if a little slant kid comes up to him, he ready to blow the kid’s head off. You know the kind. Well, the lieutenant, he looked the bodies over and he seen somebody took ears. Three of the bodies had ears that was missing. Now, shit, man, we been takin’ ears steady, but see, this was different, you know? This lieutenant, he like to went crazy. He started jumpin’ up and down and yellin’ how’s we was gonna get them savages done this and I says, ‘Hell, Lieutenant, them Marines don’t need no ears where they’re at now.’”