by Joe Haldeman
J. Edgar Hoover planted the news story that made King change his reservation to the Lorraine Motel.
The fire this time
The television in the lounge was almost always on, but the nurse never allowed it to be tuned to a news program. That was probably smart, since most of the boys and men on the ward had psychological problems relating to Vietnam, and the networks had discovered how profitable it was to provide the public with daily war footage.
But the lack of local news was suddenly disconcerting. They could smell the smoke and when the sun went down they could see the flickering reflection of flames on the low-lying clouds. Were there lunatic mobs ranging around the city attacking white people? Did they survive Vietnam just to be killed by Americans?
Frank White was playing double solitaire with Spider. “You have relatives in town, White?”
“Not anymore. Moved out.” That was unusually direct for White. “Landlord sell the building fuckin’ right out from under ’em, they go back to Sou’ Carolina.”
“White guy?” Spider asked. “The landlord?”
“Nah. White nigger, is what he was. Jive-ass son of a bitch, he doin’ it all over town, is what my father say. Rippin’ off the brothers, the motherfucker.” He shifted three cards. “You worried about you’ folks?”
“Yeah. I tried to call but can’t get out.”
“They live out Bethesda?” Spider nodded. “Shit, they ain’t gonna let ’em burn Bethesda. Gonna be like L.A. a couple years ago. Long as the black folks burn out our own neighborhoods, nobody give a shit. They move in on fuckin’ Whitey the fuckin’ cops gonna mow ’em down.”
“Guess so.” Spider built the hearts up from seven to Jack. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“What, you kill fuckin’ Martin Luther King? You got nothin’ to be sorry for.”
Knox had moved quietly behind Spider. “Wish you guys wouldn’t be talkin’ this shit.”
“We talk what the fuck we want, motherfucker.”
“You want a shot, Frank? That what you want?”
“Get off my fuckin’ case, motherfucker.” He stood up. “I give you a fuckin’ shot!”
“Come on, White,” Spider said. “You can’t beat him.”
“Oh, fuck this shit.” White flipped the card table over suddenly and dove toward Knox, clutching for his throat. Knox sidestepped and kicked him behind the knee. He went down hard and Knox pinioned both arms behind his back. “Nurse,” he said, voice only slightly raised, “Code Blue.”
Two other black patients stalked over. “You let go the brother,” said one, even bigger than Knox. “Whose side you on, anyhow?”
“Get back in bed, Royce. You want a shot, too?”
“Yeah, whose side you on?” the other one said. Two more black patients joined them.
“You stop this ‘side’ shit. Need that Blue, nurse.”
“Don’t get no nurse.” Royce stepped forward and aimed a kick at Knox’s face. Knox raised one hand to block it and White squirmed away. Three of them piled on Knox and Spider stood up.
“Come on, guys. This won’t—” Someone kicked him in the balls and, when he doubled over, rabbit-punched him into oblivion.
Fires
By midafternoon on the 5th of April, there were more than seventy fires raging in Washington, and open looting was going on two blocks from the White House. That building and the Capitol were protected behind cordons of soldiers.
Seventy-five thousand National Guard troops were spread through 110 cities; “controlling” the rioting, arson, and looting that had broken out in black neighborhoods all over the country would eventually result in 2,500 casualties, 39 deaths.
For some blacks it was an explosion of bottled-up rage. For some, well publicized by the white press and television, it was just an opportunity to raise hell or go shopping without the inconvenience of cash. (A London Times reporter caught in the Washington looting claimed “most of the youngsters had never heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, let alone his murder.”) For a few, it was an unprecedented political opportunity.
Martin Luther King had not been admired by all blacks. His Nobel Peace Prize didn’t cut any ice with people who perceived America as the battleground in a lopsided race war.
King had followed his idol Gandhi in a belief that nonviolent resistance would eventually prevail against the white power structure, as it had in India. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference was joined by the mainstream National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in that belief. But not many young blacks were listening. Even the pacifistically named Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was moving away from King and toward the violent radical Black Panther Party.
The Black Panthers themselves were split by conflicting ideologies and personalities at the top. Stokely Carmichael called for a pure color-line division, blacks of all classes united against all whites. Blacks who didn’t cooperate would be “offed.” Eldridge Cleaver didn’t think that Black Power could prevail without the cooperation of sympathetic whites; he called for a united front of all radical forces against the Establishment, who were not themselves all white. Both leaders were forceful, charismatic, educated, and unbending. One party wasn’t big enough for both of them.
The Establishment’s police almost simplified the problem for the Panthers on April 5th. Cleaver had hated King, but wasn’t above using his death for political ends. He exhorted a rally in Berkeley to avenge their fallen leader. Later that day, police surrounded Cleaver and a fellow Panther in a burning building in Oakland. According to Cleaver, they came out with their hands up, but the cops opened fire anyhow. His companion was hit five times and killed. Cleaver was spared but was beaten up in the ambulance and later in jail.
By the end of 1968, Cleaver and Carmichael would flee the country, finding asylum in Algeria and Guinea, respectively. Black resistance to the white Establishment became more and more fragmented, less effective.
The ghetto fires burned down and in some places neighborhoods were rebuilt. In some places, they were rebuilt for black people and businesses to move back in. In Washington, D.C., a couple of blocks from where the London reporter had talked to the black looters, the new FBI building rose up from the ashes, a brooding fortress for J. Edgar Hoover, its architecture jarring in a graceful city. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, might have liked it.
Boy hero
Bright glare and ammonia and a pounding headache. Spider woke up in a hospital bed in a room that was beige, not green. “No concussion,” said the voice behind the glare. “You hear me, Speidel?”
“Yeah, yeah, shit.” The room started to come into focus. A stranger in a white tunic, holding a doctor’s light. Another stranger in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, green and red and orange.
“What happened? God, I feel like shit.” It felt like he’d been kicked in the testicles. He remembered he had been.
“Here. Take a couple of Darvon.” He accepted the capsules from the doctor-or-whatever and washed them down with ice water. “You take it from here, Mike. I got a lot of customers.”
The other man loomed like a garish jungle cartoon and put a cool hand on Spider’s forehead. “You’ll be okay, John. Spider.”
“Captain Folsom?” Spider hadn’t recognized Captain My Captain, out of uniform.
“I came on duty as soon as I heard about the riot,” he said gruffly. “An extra pair of hands.”
“A riot? That fight in the day room turned into a riot?”
“Well, the duty nurse had to lock herself inside her station and call the MPs. Several of the patients went to the stockade.”
That’ll cure what ails them, Spider thought. “What happened to Knox?”
“He suffered a broken nose. But he dealt out a good deal more than that.”
“Old White jumped him. Never would’ve thought he could move so fast. Then a bunch of other guys piled on.”
“Knox says you stood up for him; that’s why you got creamed.”
“Uh huh.” Actua
lly, Spider didn’t think that was exactly what had happened. He did remember standing up, true; and saying something. But nothing heroic.
“I think it would be well to speed up your release rather than put you back on the ward. You know, with all the, uh, Negroes. I’ll be calling your parents tomorrow morning. You can rest here for a couple of days while we outprocess you.”
“Home?”
“That’s right, home and a civilian. You’ll outrank me!” He stood up to leave and Spider shook his hand and thanked him numbly. Home? Was he well enough?
A pretty nurse came in with pills. His usual Thorazine and Valium, and a little blue one she said was a sleeping pill. He took them all and then regretted the sleeping pill when he heard the theme from Star Trek come from the TV. He watched about fifteen minutes of an episode he hadn’t seen before, but couldn’t keep his eyes open.
Life is but a dream
Spider is standing on the walk that leads to his home in Bethesda. Behind him, a jeep pulls away.
He has a heavy duffle bag and, inexplicably, his M16. No, it’s Sarge’s M16, the one that works, with two magazines taped back-to-back. The selector is on AUTO. He clicks it back to SAFE, but then resets it back to fully automatic. This only looks like home. He knows where he is.
Spider is wearing tattered jungle fatigues, spattered with blood and brains. He goes up the walk slowly, dragging the duffle bag behind him. Checking the ground for booby-traps. The trees for snipers.
He reaches for the doorbell but the door is slightly open. Inside, he hears dinner sounds: murmured conversation, clinking silverware and glasses. Smell of pork chops.
He silently eases the door open with the muzzle of the rifle. Louder noise, stronger smell. He leaves the duffle bag and stalks through the entrance hall, the living room, unchanged in any detail but subtly different.
The dining room. As expected, his parents are chatting amiably with the man with no face. Everyone is eating human parts.
Spider fires from the hip, emptying a magazine into the man with no face. He explodes in a cloud of bone fragments and dust and dry shreds. The head falls onto the dinner plate and stares at him sideways. His mother is screaming.
Spider ejects the magazines and reverses it. He releases the cocking lever and shoulders the rifle, aims, puts a burst of three into his mother’s chest. She fountains blood, still screaming, and tips over backward. His father stands up and throws his dinner napkin down on the table and says something stern. Spider empties the rest of the magazine into him, blowing away his face, stitching his chest and abdomen. He sprawls forward over the table.
Spider sits down to a plate of pork chops.
Baggage
There was no need to take winter clothes to California. Beverly left most of her warm things with Sherry. It did not make her happy to see that all her future life would fit into two cardboard boxes and a suitcase.
Of course it was good not to be a slave to material things. Lee didn’t even own a suitcase; all of his stuff fit into a knapsack and a canvas shopping bag, plus another bag for his painters’ tools, the good brushes and rollers, the spattered cap and overalls.
Both of their worlds fit with room to spare in the trunk of the Thing, Lee’s beat-up old Buick. At the Army-Navy store, they picked up a Boy Scout camp cooking kit and a Sterno stove; they made up a “chuck wagon” box with cans of beans and stuff and a couple of plates and cups long ago liberated from the university. They turned the back seat into a bed so that one could sleep while the other drove. They would save a fortune on motels and restaurants.
It was more than a month before they’d planned to leave, but there wasn’t much reason to stay. After King’s assassination, white people weren’t welcome at the Poor People’s March headquarters, and it wasn’t safe for them to be down in that part of the city, anyhow. The warehouse job was over, and although Larry promised he could get them more work in a couple of weeks, they figured they could paint in California as easily as Maryland, and the vibes would be a lot better. Washington was nothing but bad karma, death and hate and destruction.
Besides, they didn’t need a lot of money. Lee had a large Prince Albert can of primo Colombian and, as the saying went, “dope can get you through times of no money better than money can get you through times of no dope.” That was more literally true with Lee than with most hippies, because of his talent for turning grass into cash. You could drop him blindfolded into a one-horse farming town in Idaho, and in ten minutes he’d find the town’s only doper and make a deal that left them both feeling good.
Meanwhile, Beverly did not feel good, on several related levels. She had missed a period and was discreetly sick after breakfast almost every morning. She hadn’t said anything to Lee, and he evidently hadn’t noticed. She wanted to get out to California and get it over with. It would be easier to get an abortion out there, and no way that her parents would find out.
She hadn’t stopped thinking about Spider. But she told herself that it was probably best for her to disappear before he was released from the hospital. Nothing was going to happen between them. No need to add to his problems.
The idea of an abortion made her sick with horror and fear. But the alternative of having a child, even if it could have been legitimate, was unthinkable. She was still a child herself, not ready to be a parent. Lee would never be ready. She would lose him.
Besides, she rationalized, who could ever want to bring a child into a world like this? America, Amerika, on the eve of destruction; the black-power fanatics and rednecks facing off with torches, the pigs with clubs and tear gas, the National Guard with guns—and Brezhnev waiting offstage with his finger on the button.
Homecoming (1)
They laid out a uniform of ironed starched khakis and new dull black dress shoes that had never been polished. Nothing quite fit. Spider felt like a display dummy. There were brown plastic vials with thirty days’ supply of Valium and Thorazine and a prescription for another thirty days’ worth. He had an appointment on May 6th with a Dr. Taupo at the Baltimore VA Hospital.
He got through Outprocessing in a surprising ten minutes. They had his completed DD 214, the basic document that proved he had once been a soldier and now was not, and a message from his mother that Aunt Phyllis was going to pick him up at 2:00. They also gave him a backpay envelope with $147 cash. He would much rather have blown ten bucks on a cab ride than wait around for two hours to be locked up in a car with his least favorite relative. But neither his mother nor Aunt Phyllis answered the phone, so he took his stuff down to the canteen to kill time with lunch and coffee.
Among his effects was a black cardboard box containing a Purple Heart, a lush purple ribbon from which hung a golden heart bearing a stern likeness of General Washington. He hefted it: anodized aluminum.
Could you get a Purple Heart for running into a tree? Maybe it was for getting kicked in the nuts defending a medic. No, the typed orders tucked underneath said
Date action: 29 January 1968
Theater: USARPAC
Reason: Wound received in action.
Authority: By direction of the President and under the provisions of AR 672-5-1.
The President, wow. That and a dime would get you a cup of coffee.
Actually, Spider knew it was potentially valuable. The medal gave him a ten-point preference for Civil Service jobs, if he ever wanted to work for the United States government again. That didn’t seem likely. Did they use the point system for astronauts? Astronaut or President, those were the only jobs he’d take. No, scratch President.
Captain My Captain had dropped off two science fiction books, Van Vogt’s The Pawns of Null-A and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. He’d read both of them already, but thought the Heinlein would be interesting to reread in light of his recent experience.
It took him about an hour, since he’d read it only a few months before being drafted, and it was still pretty clear in his memory. It described a strange future where only veterans were allowed to
vote or hold office. Spider wondered about certifiably insane veterans like himself.
No one in the book was driven even slightly insane by combat. All the soldiers were either heroes or cowards, but fortunately all the cowards were weeded out in training.
Well, it was just a book, and the enemy involved were alien Bugs, not humans, so the soldiers were exterminators rather than murderers. Bugs, slopes, gooks, dinks. He wondered what the VC called Americans, to make them easier to kill. “Round-eye” and “capitalistic running dog” lacked punch.
Maybe they didn’t need to call us names to dehumanize us. If Vietnam were a science fiction novel, it would be clear who the invading aliens were, complete with inexplicable motivation and futuristic weapons. He remembered bringing that up in a bull session once; how Killer had gone along with him, but the other guys thought it was all flying-saucer bullshit.
It came at him like a physical blow: it doesn’t mean shit anymore because they’re all dead now. Coffee surged up into his throat and he choked it back. It was a blow that came at odd times, once or twice a day. Sweat trickled down his ribs and he swallowed hard, staring into the jungle. Into the white room with the roadkill smell. Get a fucking grip on yourself. He snapped the top off a bottle and tore out the cotton and shook out two Valium capsules. His ears rang with the rattle and roar and scream of the ambush. He carried the pills to the water fountain in front of the latrine but he realized he’d better not use it; if he leaned over he’d probably vomit. He walked carefully back to the end of the serving line and got a glass of water. He didn’t look at the woman at the cash register because he knew she had become the man with no face. He swallowed the Valium and walked cautiously back to his table and lit a cigarette. When he set it in the ashtray, he saw there were already two there, smoldering, a short one and a long one. Well, you didn’t have to be crazy to do that. A lot of people do that.