by Joe Haldeman
Beverly had never liked April Fools’ Day. As far back as she could remember, her father had startled her with some malicious silliness that he considered good clean fun, and so for more than half her life she had tiptoed through that day, expecting the worst.
This April 1st, she was invited to be with Spider’s father, not her own, going with him to Walter Reed to visit Spider for the first time. His mother had begged off tearfully, saying she would do more harm than good.
Lee wondered whether Beverly would do any good, either, and said so, but otherwise didn’t pressure her. It was obvious that she was unsure and nervous about it and would probably be miserable no matter which course she chose. So he played it smart and stayed neutral.
Mr. Speidel picked her up a little before eight. She was dressed in an alien high-schoolish frock, wearing makeup the way she had when she was dating Spider. Lee watched from an upstairs window as they drove off. He skipped breakfast and went to work early.
She showed up at the warehouse while the guys were eating lunch, still in the frock, her painting clothes rolled up in a grocery bag. Larry wolf-whistled at her prettiness. She smiled nervously and said she had to change.
“Take it easy,” Lee said after she disappeared into the bathroom. “Can’t you see she’s been crying?”
“Hokay, okay. Maybe she needs like some cheerin’ up, hmm?”
“Maybe. Let’s let her call the shots.”
She came back out in the baggy spattered overalls, her hair pinned up, and quietly accepted a slice of cold pizza and a long-necked Budweiser, the first time she’d had a beer on the job. She gave Haskel a dollar and took a quarter in change.
Young Vince broke the silence. “So what was he like?” The other guys shot him a look.
“Oh, he was real quiet. Drugged, for sure.” To Lee: “Valium and … what was that one you told me about?”
“Thorazine. Use it to bring people down from bad acid trips.”
“That’s it. Valium and Thorazine, the doctor said. I’m not sure whether he recognized me. His dad, yeah. But even with his dad he didn’t bring up anything about the past.
“He looked really out of it. Just really half-listening to what we said. But he’s nervous, too. His dad’s umbrella made a noise falling over, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.”
“I think that’s normal,” Haskel said. “I still do it.”
“At least he’s out of the boonies,” Lee said. “He’s alive and has a chance to get better.”
“The doctor, he give the guy a prognosis?” Larry said, the last word slowly.
“No, not the doctor. He acted half as stoned as Spider. Some other guy, a captain I talked to before on the phone, he was sort of optimistic. But he seemed goofy, too, in person. Fidgety. Maybe being around crazy people all the time gets to you.” She looked at Lee. “He will be coming home, he said. In a month or two.”
Lee nodded. “We’ll handle that when the time comes, I guess.”
She put the pizza slice back half-eaten. “I’m not sure any of it’s our problem anymore. My problem. If he doesn’t even recognize me.”
“Well, he’ll be happier at home, anyhow.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. His father was really pissed off at his mother for not coming along, and you can tell that there’s something a lot worse than that buried away. He’s really on the edge.” She sipped at the beer. “It’s funny. If you didn’t know any of them, and you put all four of them in a room together—Spider and his father and the shrinks—you couldn’t say which one of them was really crazy, you know? Spider would seem kind of dumb, yeah, but his father really comes on more nutty, like he was about to explode. He’s always been a mean drunk. One of the shrinks is creepy, antsy, and the other’s as stoned as any dropout hippy.”
Larry laughed. “You ask me, the whole fuckin’ world’s crazy. Some of us is crazier than others, but it’s all a big fuckin’ nut house.”
“Well, that explains everything,” Lee said, and lit up a joint.
Neither Lee nor Beverly had seen the morning paper, which had arrived late after the biggest Stop the Presses! order in some years. At the end of a predictable pro forma television speech the previous night, the President dropped a bombshell. Banner headlines exclaimed LBJ TELLS NATION HE WON’T RUN.
Also in the paper, the results of a Gallup poll predicting that Robert Kennedy would beat either Republican, Nixon or Rockefeller, and a wry note saying that ex-actor Ronald Reagan had been chosen as California’s favorite son candidate.
Martin Luther King would have had the headline if LBJ hadn’t upstaged him. Dr. King spoke to an audience of four thousand at Washington Cathedral, trying to bolster support for the Poor People’s Campaign. The previous week’s demonstration in Memphis had erupted in violence; King warned his sympathetic audience that “if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will be not only as bad, but worse than last year.”
In years to come, not many people would see past the smoke and flames of 1968 to remember that previous summer. Dr. King had three days to live.
Sweet mystery of life
Spider could smell Captain My Captain’s tobacco for some hours before his appointment. He must have changed blends; it smelled a little better. He took the list out of his pocket and checked for the hundredth time what he was going to ask. He stared at the clock and wished it had a second hand. When it finally crawled to 10:29, he walked across the hall and knocked on the door. When Captain Folsom bade him enter, he walked in, hardly limping anymore, and stood at loose attention until Folsom offered a chair, waving without looking up from the file folder he was studying.
As usual, Folsom gazed at him for an uncomfortable period before speaking. “So. Specialist Knox said you wanted to speak to me about your medication.”
“Yes, sir. I just can’t think straight. I have trouble, um, concentrating.” He tried to remember what was on the list. “My memory’s shot to hell, too. Maybe that’s the shock therapy, though.”
“You’ve become an expert on shock therapy?”
“No, sir. I’m not an expert on anything, In fact, I feel pretty stupid about everything. But I do know there’s things that happened to me that I just don’t remember anymore. Big things.”
“Such as?”
“Like sex. I know I’ve done it because they said I was getting pills for syphilis. Antibiotics. But I don’t remember ever doing it. Not with anybody.”
“Spider.” He inspected his pipe, a meerschaum whose finish was an ugly dapple of off-white, brown, yellow, and black. “Sometimes we forget things because they were too unpleasant to remember.”
“That just doesn’t make sense.”
“Sex isn’t always pleasant. Sometimes it’s very painful.”
“If I was gonna forget unpleasant things, how come I remember every stinking body I took out of every fucking bag at Graves Registration? How come I remember everybody in my platoon gettin’ blown away in that ambush? That’s unpleasant. I can’t forget those things. I think about them all the time.”
“It would be worse without the drugs and the ECT.”
“I don’t know. If I’m gonna remember the bad shit anyhow, I’d just as soon remember everything.”
“You can’t say that. Don’t you see? You can’t know how bad the things were that you’re forgetting, repressing.”
“Yeah, like getting laid. That sounds really horrible.” He crossed his legs and rubbed the sole of his foot through the slipper. “The bullshit with the dirty pictures and the shocks. Is that why I’ve forgotten having sex?”
“Oh, no, never,” he said quickly. “A slight shock to your foot couldn’t affect your memory.” Three days before, they’d sat down Spider in a small mirrored room with a stack of 8×10 black-and-white photographs of naked people. Some of the subjects were standing or lying alone in various postures, and some were couples engaged in various sexual practices. Whenever the picture showed homosexual sex, or just a
man alone in a state of arousal, Spider was given a shock through a pair of electrodes taped to his foot. Captain Folsom had put the aversion-therapy treatment together himself, at no cost to the government, and he was proud of it.
Spider looked at his list. “That was another thing I wanted to know. I got a shock every time I turned over a picture of a queer. Is that supposed to prove something? Does somebody think that I’m queer?”
“Well, we don’t use that word. But you said in an interview that you had had sex with a man named Lee, and you enjoyed it.”
“What?”
“And when you came here you had a syphilis chancre in the anus. There is only one way that could happen.”
Spider looked at him for a moment and his jaw dropped. “Oh, bullshit. Me let somebody fuck me in the ass?” He screwed up his face. “I mean, ee-ewe. I’d kill him first. I really would.”
“His name was Lee Madden. You remember Lee Madden?”
Spider looked nervously around the room, as if there might be a queer hidden someplace. “This is such bullshit! Jesus! This Lee Madden says he fucked me? You bring him here and I’ll fuck him, all right.”
Folsom sat quietly, observing. Denial, healthy under the circumstances. “You remember Beverly. You saw her in this room not long ago.”
“Yeah, ’course I do. I don’t remember fucking her, though.”
“She’s Lee Madden’s roommate. You must have met him through her.”
“Now, wait.” He looked at the floor and thought. “She does have a roommate Lee, but Lee’s a girl. Oriental, really pretty. I remember now, some. Maybe I did have sex with her, with Lee, not Beverly.”
“Lee is a twenty-two-year-old white male who got out of the draft for homosexuality.”
“So I met him over at Beverly’s and let him cornhole me.”
“That’s the word you used before.”
“That’s absolutely crazy. I would never do that.”
“But you said you did.”
“No!” He gripped the arms of the chairs as if to restrain himself. “You believed me then, but you don’t believe me now?”
“It’s not a question of ‘belief’—”
“The fuck it isn’t!” He got halfway to his feet, leaning toward Folsom.
“Sit down, Speidel! If you can’t control yourself I will have Specialist Knox restrain and medicate you.”
Spider slumped back into the chair. “Look. Isn’t there some way you can test somebody? I mean, I know I’m not that way. Like, the pictures of the girls, they got to me, but the pictures of the boys didn’t do anything.”
“That could be a defense mechanism. How do you explain getting a syphilis sore … there … and on the mouth, rather than on the penis?”
“How the hell should I know? Ask some sexologist, if there is such a thing.”
Folsom pursed his lips. “Do you know what Ockham’s razor is?”
“Huh uh.” Spider swallowed hard. “A treatment for syphilis?”
“No, it’s a logical principle. Basically, it means that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. In your case, it means that you must have had oral and anal sex with a man, and willfully put it out of your mind.” He leaned forward. “But you know … I hadn’t thought of this … that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re homosexual. It could have been done against your will. Then, because you couldn’t handle the memory, you blocked it off.”
Spider rubbed his chin. “People do that.”
“Yes, they do. Maybe there was somebody in your company in Vietnam? Somebody who was aggressively homosexual?”
“Uh, no. Not really. There were two medics everybody knew were gettin’ it on together, weirdos. Not aggressive, though.”
“Were either of them named Lee?”
“I don’t know. They were both Doc; Artillery Doc and Engineer Doc.”
He nodded blankly at that. He was thinking. “You’re still having the bad dreams.”
“Not every night. Sometimes.”
“And the apparition? The man with no face?”
“He, uh, hasn’t been around in a while.”
“Well.” Folsom wrote several lines on a pale yellow 3×5 card. Then he squinted at what he had written and tapped the card on the desk three times. “We’ll discontinue the ECT for the time being, and the aversion therapy. And we’ll adjust your medication downward, see whether your concentration improves. But you must promise me”—he stabbed the yellow card at Spider for punctuation—“promise that you’ll tell the truth if you start feeling worse.”
“Oh, I will, sir, I promise.”
“Bad dreams, hallucinations, funny feelings about the men around you. We can fix them all, but sometimes it takes time.”
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
“Well. That’s all. You may go.”
“Thank you, sir.” Spider tried not to move too fast, leaving. The pipe smoke was really getting to him. He carefully slipped the door shut, and noticed three things:
The smoke smell in the corridor was different from inside. There was wood and asphalt. That’s what he’d smelled earlier, when he thought Captain My Captain had changed blends.
Most of the patients were standing in the hall, looking toward the nurses’ station.
Two white MPs were talking to the duty nurse. They carried automatic rifles.
“What’s up?” Spider whispered.
From forty feet away, one of the MPs answered him, turning to face them with his rifle at port arms: “Return to your wards. The Negroes are rioting. Washington is burning.”
Martin Luther King and James Earl Ray
Martin Luther King had returned to Memphis in April to try to straighten out the sanitation-worker strike that had escalated into violence, the disturbance possibly started by undercover police infiltrators.
King’s party had made reservations to stay in a white-owned hotel. A newspaper story berated him for that, so he changed to the black-owned Lorraine Motel. There was a 205-foot clear shot from the bathroom of a nearby rooming house to King’s motel room balcony. A man named John Willard checked into the rooming house the same morning King checked into the Lorraine. He chose a lousy room whose only saving grace was that it was near the bathroom.
He locked himself into the bathroom and waited.
King stepped out onto the balcony and exchanged a few words with Jesse Jackson and a musician friend. His chauffeur hollered up from the parking lot that it was getting chilly; King ought to get a topcoat before they left for dinner. He agreed and started to return to his room and was struck by a .30/06 bullet on the right jaw. The round is designed for much larger game. He died at St. Joseph’s Hospital an hour later, throat torn open, spinal cord severed.
The weapon was immediately recovered, a Remington Model 760, coincidentally the weapon of choice for Marine snipers in Khe Sanh, who routinely attempted head shots at fifteen times the distance between King’s balcony and the rooming house bathroom.
There were no fingerprints in the bathroom, none in Willard’s room. There was one on the rifle, but it was never linked to anyone. Right after the single shot, two white Mustangs took off in opposite directions from in front of the rooming house. An abandoned white Mustang was later found in Atlanta, ultimately traced to James Earl Ray, an escaped convict who was going to bartending school in Los Angeles under the name Eric Starvo Galt. He had recently undergone plastic surgery and had bought the Mustang with $2,000 cash, though he had no legitimate source of income.
Ray was not exactly a cunning criminal. He was eventually arrested in London’s Heathrow Airport when he accidentally showed two passports with different names on them and—oops!—was found to be carrying a loaded .38 pistol.
The case was quickly closed, but there were loose ends that indicated at least one other person was involved. Ray was a non-smoker, but the floors of the rooming house and the Mustang had been littered with Viceroy butts. Clothes found with the rifle were not the same size as the clothes in the Mustang
trunk that led, through Los Angeles laundry marks, to James Earl Ray. Witnesses’ descriptions of John Willard varied wildly, though admittedly that’s not uncommon. But there were those two white Mustangs.
A lot of people wanted Martin Luther King out of the way. Twenty years after the assassination, his soft-spoken son, County Commissioner Martin Luther King III, said, “That’s what he was killed about: redistributing the wealth and resources. And if anybody could have gotten the masses to say, ‘We want the wealth redistributed,’ he could have. So the powers that be said, ‘Well, he’s got to be removed.’” The son went on to exonerate Lyndon Johnson specifically, saying, “It could have been the Mafia, it could have been a number of forces. Anyone who felt threatened that their wealth could be … diluted.”
In 1978, the House Assassinations Committee reported that “there is a likelihood that James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King as the result of a conspiracy.” Circumstantial evidence linked Ray with the New Orleans Marcello Mafia family, who might have financed the hit as a favor for the Ku Klux Klan. James Earl Ray apparently had no racial or political reason to murder King himself; he was just a pusher, forger, smuggler, thief, and evidently a better marksman than, say, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Or was he? Ray, who was discharged from the army for “ineptness,” claims he didn’t fire the shot. He took money and orders from a man named Raoul, but claims he was set up, and doesn’t have any idea as to who actually did the deed.
A deliciously paranoid frisson to this tragic crime is that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover detested Martin Luther King. He had agents tail King and make tapes of an extramarital affair, and then—three weeks before King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize—mailed the tapes anonymously to King’s wife, along with a note suggesting that the only honorable action for King would be suicide. When that bit of blackmail produced no results, he released the tapes to reporters.
Hoover had close personal ties with Mafia figures for most of his life, though until the 1960s denied that the Mob existed. He continually blocked Bureau action against organized crime until he was forced into it by the very public opposition of his boss, the attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, whom he also despised.