Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  Mrs. Hamner’s eyes welled up with tears and she grasped Jacey’s hand in both of hers. ‘‘You were a great friend to Dorothy. I just know she’s looking down at us right now, and she knows how much you care about her.”

  Jacey felt tears in her own eyes, and they sat there for a moment holding hands across the table. Then Mrs. Hamner stood up and, still holding her hand, led the way down a short hall and up a short flight of stairs.

  “This is Dorothy’s room,” she said, opening a door. She flipped on an overhead light. The room was filled with Dorothy’s things from high school: awards for being in a regional champion band, a boyfriend’s letter sweater, photographs from proms, pom-poms, and all of the other stuff girls accumulate in their teens. Strangely missing was any evidence that Dorothy was a cadet. Mrs. Hamner must have realized that Jacey had noticed this, and said, “We keep Dorothy’s West Point things downstairs in the family room.”

  “I had a room just like this,” said Jacey. She saw the corner of a laptop computer sticking out from beneath a huge teddy bear on a desk across the room. “Is that Dorothy’s laptop?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Hamner. “My husband uses it, too. That’s how we sent our E-mail things to Dorothy. But neither of us has touched it since she died. Everything in her room is just as she left it the last time she was home.”

  Jacey picked up the teddy bear, put it on the bed, and sat down at the desk. She opened the laptop and switched it on.

  Mrs. Hamner was still standing in the door. “I know Dorothy used to sit there when she was at home and work on her E-mail, because every once in a while she’d come downstairs and tell me some funny joke they were passing around on the Internet. You go ahead. I’m going back downstairs.”

  The laptop powered up, and Jacey scanned the desktop. She hit the icon for Netscape and used Dorothy’s password, “catch22,” to open her mail. Unlike her computer at school, the laptop seemed to have most of her E-mail on the hard drive. The “in-box” file contained about fifty messages. Jacey hit the “sent” button and found that that file contained just over a hundred messages.

  Jacey’s finger hit the touchpad and she started opening the messages in the “sent” file, which had been written on the laptop by Jacey and her father. The messages from her father responded to E-mail Jacey had sent from West Point. It was mostly chatty stuff between daughter and parents, responding to Dorothy’s complaints about midterm exams, congratulating her on the brigade championship her orienteering team had won. Dorothy had written quite a few E-mails the previous summer when she had been home, messages to classmates and friends from West Point, talking about boys and parties, lamenting the days that were disappearing as their return to the Academy loomed at the end of their summer leaves. And there were some messages she had sent to friends she’d had in high school, who were scattered around the state and the country at various colleges. There was nothing in the “sent” file about the Labor Day party, and none of the E-mail she had sent from home had been to Favro. At least, none of it stored on the hard drive, anyway.

  Jacey closed the “sent” file and opened the list of messages in her in-box. It was loaded down with messages Dorothy had sent her parents from West Point, making plans for weekend visits home and arranging for several visits her parents had made to West Point for football and basketball games the previous year. There were responses from her friends to the E-mails she had sent the previous summer. Jacey found two of her own E-mails to Dorothy, which she had sent on her laptop during summer training.

  She went through the rest of the message list and found Dorothy’s E-mails to her parents, and more personal stuff to her friends. When she reached the bottom of the in-box, she noticed the date and time of the final message. It was three days before Labor Day. There were no messages after that. Jacey sat there staring at the last message that had been logged onto the laptop in Dorothy’s room at home.

  What if her parents didn’t check their E-mail regularly?

  She hit the “get messages” button and waited. Sure enough, two new messages popped up in the in-box. Both were from Dorothy.

  Jacey opened the first message. It had been sent two days before Labor Day. Dorothy was excited about the party and clearly smitten with Rick Favro. She told her mother about a new dress she’d bought that she planned on wearing to the party. She’d gotten her hair cut just before returning to the Academy. It was a letter from a girl who was falling in love.

  Jacey closed the first message and opened the second. She checked the time and date. It had been sent at 4:04 in the morning on the day after Labor Day, the day Dorothy died!

  Mom: I tried calling you just now, but you weren’t home. I guess you had to work early today. I need to talk to you. Something happened, and I don’t know what to do about it. I’ll call you later today, after the parade. Love, Dorothy.

  Jacey sat there staring at the laptop’s screen. So something did happen to her, and it must have happened at the party, or else why would she be trying to call her mother so early in the morning? She searched quickly through Dorothy’s drawer, found an empty floppy disk, saved the last E-mail Dorothy had written to the disk, and shut down the laptop.

  Downstairs, she found Mrs. Hamner sitting with her cup of tea, staring out the kitchen window. She couldn’t figure a good way to tell her what she had found, so she decided to let it go. The people who could do something about it were at West Point anyway.

  “Mrs. Hamner? I think I’d better be going now.”

  Mrs. Hamner stood and and took Jacey’s hand. “Did you find anything?”

  “Not really, ma’am.”

  “Well, thank you for driving up here. I know Dorothy would appreciate what you’re doing.”

  Mrs. Hamner opened the back door and stood there in the tranquillity of an upstate fall afternoon with a cool breeze gently ruffling her skirt. She looked at Jacey with her darkened eyes, then she leaned forward and kissed Jacey on the forehead in the way Jacey remembered her kissing Dorothy one weekend in Beast Barracks when they were plebes. Mrs. Hamner gave Jacey’s hand a little squeeze, and Jacey stepped outside and heard the screen door snap shut behind her.

  Jacey had a long drive ahead of her and some thinking to do, and as she started the car, she turned on the radio and found an oldies station that was playing Chuck Berry. He was singing about cruising and playing the radio with no particular place to go, and suddenly Jacey felt a wave wash over her and she felt a longing for the time in her life when she had a room just like Dorothy’s. For all of her youthful frights and anxieties and panics, she knew that she hadn’t had a worry in the world. She remembered how she had sat up at night in her room with her friends in their nightgowns at slumber parties, how they had whispered secrets to one another and giggled and gasped, and then Monday would come and all the secrets would have been told and they would gather in the school hallways waiting for new secrets to be whispered, eager to share and compare the mysteries of each unfolding moment of their lives as time rushed by in way too big a hurry, edging them into the future where new secrets, bigger secrets, deeper mysteries awaited.

  She knew she was there right now. This was the future and she was living it. She knew a secret, a big one, and she didn’t know where it would take her, or what she’d find when she got there. She backed down the drive and headed out of the cul-de-sac. At the corner, she gunned the engine and turned up the radio. They were playing something by the Box Tops; she couldn’t remember the title, but the lead singer kept wailing over and over that every road is a lonely street . . .

  She stopped at the turn for Route 28 as a big semi thundered past, headed south, its running lights twinkling in the dusk. Alex Chilton’s angst-tinged moan filled her ears, and she switched on her headlights, slipped the clutch, and aimed the car down the road behind the truck. The Box Tops had it right: Every road is a lonely street.

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  MELISSA CALLED out to Slaight “Chief of Staff for you on line one, s
ir.”

  He picked up the phone. “General Slaight, sir.”

  “Ry, I just got a call from an aide to Congressman Thrunstone, somebody by the name of Wasserstein. Seems like Thrunstone wants to come up there next weekend for the Southern Illinois game.”

  “We’ll be happy to have him, sir. He’s on the Board of Visitors, isn’t he?” asked Slaight, referring to the group of congressmen who served as a kind of Board of Trustees for the Academy.

  “He was, until he took over the National Security Committee in ‘ninety-four. Listen, Ry. We’ve been hearing some whispers from over on Capitol Hill that Thrunstone has been talking quietly about sponsoring a bill to either close down the service academies or consolidate Army, Navy, and Air Force into one national military college. He’s been telling people he wants to save post—cold war defense dollars, but we hear differently. What he’s really up to is putting a scare into the Army’s senior leadership so we’ll go along with him on Army manpower cutbacks. He wants to shift a lot of Army money over to Air Force and Navy weapons programs, and we’re fighting him on it. Now I don’t want you to bring any of this up with him, because he hasn’t gone public with his plans to close down the military academies. I just want you to be aware of what you’re up against.

  “All politicians are minefields, sir, but I’ll be especially careful to watch my step around Thrunstone.”

  “Don’t sell this guy short, Ry. He’s smart, he’s charming, and he’s ruthless.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Let me hear from you as soon as he’s gone.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Slaight hung up the phone and reached for his personal address book. If there was one person in the country who could fill him in on Congressman Thrunstone, it was his old classmate Leroy Buck. Slaight knew that Buck had been watching Thrunstone since he was in the State Legislature in Illinois, because Buck had been involved in southern Illinois politics all his life, and in fact had lost a race against Thrunstone for a State Senate seat back in the early 1970s.

  Buck had been Slaight’s roommate and best friend when they were cadets, and he had played a key role in helping track down the killer of David Hand. Buck had not been what you’d call a typical cadet, and he turned out to be a less than typical officer. He ended up resigning from the Army less than two years after graduation over a dispute with the lieutenant general who commanded Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  It seemed that Buck and another West Point classmate, a black guy by the name of Modell, had encountered many white owners and managers of apartment buildings in Fayetteville, the civilian community near Fort Bragg, who refused to rent to black soldiers, and that included black officers. There were a few places in the “black section” of Fayetteville that Modell could have rented, but they were run-down and much further from the post than he wanted to live. So Buck and Modell ran a “salt-and-pepper” team on the white apartment owners. Modell would show up for an apartment advertised in the paper only to be told it had just been rented. When Buck showed up to rent the same apartment only moments later, magically it would be available.

  They compiled a list of about twenty apartment complexes in this manner and turned the list over to the authorities at Fort Bragg, asking that the apartment owners be instructed that it was illegal to refuse to rent to black soldiers, or any other black citizens for that matter. After weeks of haggling with the lesser lights of the command structure of Fort Bragg, they ended up standing before the Commanding General, who let them know that he had no intention of disrupting the local community. Buck and Modell informed the general that they had studied the Fair Housing Act of 1968 at West Point and knew the Act had a provision that required the military to enforce the law by denying the payment of military housing funds to landlords who discriminated. The Commanding General went ballistic. They later discovered that it was his intention to run for governor when he retired the following year, and so his unwillingness to confront racism in Fayetteville was tinged with political ambition. Buck and Modell stood their ground and found themselves asked to resign from the Army, which, while solving Modell’s housing problem, brought their careers to an abrupt end. Slaight had always believed that the Army had suffered a far greater loss than either Buck or Modell.

  Slaight dialed a number in southern Illinois and a voice answered, “Midwest Financial Services.”

  “Buck, what are you up to?” he asked.

  “Slaight, goddammit. What the hell’s goin’ on? You sound like you’re callin’ from next door.”

  “I’m sitting here in my office taking in my view of the Hudson. How about you?”

  “I’m sitting here working on some fool’s problem with his back taxes. What’s on your mind?”

  “I’ve got your congressman coming up here to visit on Saturday for the Southern Illinois game.”

  “You don’t mean the distinguished silver-tongued devil Chuck Thrunstone, do you?”

  “One and the same.”

  “That SOB’s a crafty one, I’ll tell you that much. If they cut ‘em any sharper than Thrunstone these days, I haven’t heard about ‘em.”

  “Fill me in on his background, will you?”

  “Well, you know he was a state rep for quite a few years, then he ran for State Senate and beat my ass. He stayed there until he rode the Reagan landslide of 1980 into the Congress. He’s been carrying the district by sixty percent or more based on the farm programs he helped to shove through when he was on the Ag Committee. It surprised the hell out of a lot of people here in Illinois when he quit Ag to run the National Security Committee.”

  “General Meuller just called and told me Thrunstone has been making some noises about sponsoring a bill to close down the service academies. What do you think he’s up to? I mean, West Point is not exactly a huge item in the defense budget, and he’s saying he wants to save defense dollars.”

  “It’s not a budgetary thing. It’s something else.”

  Even over the airphone, Slaight could almost hear the gears turning in Buck’s brain. “What kind of a guy is he?” Slaight asked.

  “Kinda rare breed. Rural Republican who uses suburban Republican tactics and raises major bucks every time he runs. He outspent his opponent nearly two to one last time around, using a good deal of money from defense industries. On a personal level, people say he’s okay. People ‘round here like him ‘cause he comes across as a good old boy. He works the American Legion halls and the small town potluck church dinners like a pro, which he is. He’s been in politics his whole life.”

  “You got to know him personally, back when you ran against him, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” There was a strange pause, as if Buck was collecting thoughts he didn’t really want to revisit. “I used to kind of like him back before he switched parties. He did a lot of good for the state back then. Then he turned into one of those pro-Nixon Democrats, and he switched parties, and that was when I ran against him. Me and another guy ran a candidate against him for the House four years ago. He killed us with right-wing Willie Horton–style TV attack ads, and that soured me on him for good.”

  “So it’s just politics? I mean, between you and him.”

  “It’s never just politics, Ry. It’s all politics. It’s in the air. Only trouble is out here in Illinois, me and Thrunstone have got to breathe the same goddamned air.”

  Slaight laughed. Not a single edge had been filed off Leroy Buck over all these years. “What’s your best guess about what he’s up to rattling his saber against the service academies?”

  Buck turned from the phone to someone in his office and told them to hold a call. When he came back on, he sounded animated. “This whole thing with the military has turned so goddamned political. Did you see that article about the study some college professor did?”

  “Yeah, I saw it. Amazing.”

  “What’d he say? Twenty years ago about a third of officers were registered Republicans. Now two-thirds of them have no problem telling this guy
they’re Republicans? Christ, Ry. The Army is turning itself into an interest group of the fuckin’ Republican Party.”

  “I personally think his figures are off. The guys I know, especially senior officers, are about ninety percent Republicans. But if it’s like you say, and the Army has transformed itself into an interest group of the Republicans, why isn’t Thrunstone backing them up?”

  “Here’s what the problem is. When an organization that has been traditionally apolitical up and decides to get political, then a couple of things are gonna happen. One, the organization is gonna end up owing the politicians, and two, sooner or later the politicians are gonna take the interest group for granted. Look at the Democrats and the way they treat black supporters. Same thing is happening with the Army. They’ve become so solidly Republican, politicians like Thrunstone can take them for granted.”

  “So Thrunstone’s not afraid of the generals, because he knows they’ve got noplace else to turn.”

  “That’s right. He can look for other ways to get ‘em to come around, other than cozying up to ‘em at military-defense conventions like the Association of the United States Army. Those generals down there in the Pentagon have got incredible influence over how defense dollars are spent. If they blink their left eye, a billion goes this way, and if they blink their right eye, a billion can end up going that way. It’s a fuckin’ nightmare, Ry. Unless I’m way off base, I think Thrunstone wants to insure he’s got a stranglehold on the dollars left in the shrinking defense budget. He’s gonna want those dollars spent where him and his buddies can reap the political benefits of defense jobs, and he’s willin’ to scare the generals to make sure that happens.”

  “He wants an advantage when he deals with the generals on the next five-year defense budget.”

  “And General Meuller is lookin’ for a way to deny him that advantage, which is why you heard from him this morning.”