Kill the dove!

by Francis Kroncke

  Chapter 11: Driving to prison—Millston, FCI

  Millston Federal Correctional Institution (FCI)

  Losing Arthur—the agent has thought about that before. Losing Arthur was hard, for it had been hard to enlist Arthur. Not many of his color really have the markings of the brotherhood. And how Arthur had made it—Lord, what a great fellow! Hardworking. Persistent. Right, that was the term, persistent. The minister even used it in his last words: “Arthur was persistence.” And he was going places. Just bad luck he died young. Dying young was often marked with a sense of tragedy. More so in Arthur’s case, Lord! He was going places. A fine guy, a real Guardian. The agent likes to think of their role as Guardians. Somehow it has a scriptural tinge to it that’s fitting. And he knows Mr. Hoover is fond of it. “Guardians of America” sure sounds better than FBI.

  But that’s not his task. His is this young fellow. One of these “radicals,” high in his ideals but quite odd in how he squares what he thinks with what he does. All told, an easy day, a PC run. These guys in Protective Custody are heavily chained so there’s rarely a hassle. As he passes the road sign, “Millston, FCI 7 miles,” he knows that this one will be out of his hands in a small bucket of minutes.

  When he lets himself feel it, he has a liking towards this young fellow. There’s a pressure about him as if the air is highly charged and weighs more than that around most people. As if he could reach out and touch the spaces around the guy and his fingers would tap the density of some substance. But as has happened before, his type of discussion while drawing him to agreement in some spots, loses him when these types jump to their conclusions. They just don’t understand national security—or the average American. I mean, if this guy had met Arthur! No doubt then he’d have changed his tune.

  Definitely, his own sentiment expressed at the burial site said it all, “Arthur was a walking confirmation that America is great—the greatest.” Arthur would have set this radical straight on this war and all his mixed-up ideas about racism. He, a black man who had experienced bitter discrimination while in the Special Forces, would have given him the proper perspective. “Sure prisons have a heavy concentration of blacks. True, a higher percent of those dying in Vietnam are men of color. But don’t screw up those statistics and make them say something they don’t mean.” He can hear Arthur stating that again, right now, from beyond the grave.

  Arthur would have told this kid the real history of the blacks. Gee, how he hated how people had taken to rewriting American history as “black” history! It irked him that they imposed a self-serving interpretation on the facts and statistics. Arthur would have told him about his great-grandfather who had escaped from slavery to the North. About his cousins lynched in the South during the ’20s. And name his friends who were bludgeoned and beaten in Civil Rights demonstrations. But he would tell it as it was, the Story of Hope, chapters in the history of a democracy where people—People—wield the power. For what’s more evident of the actual working of democracy than the success of the Civil Rights movement? While others counted blows and dead bodies, Arthur celebrated the freedom that people unleashed. He knew that freedom could only come from the people, not from the government.

  That’s one of the problems with this fellow. He just doesn’t understand and he tells him so. “You still don’t understand, even standing at the gates of prison! That your imprisonment is your freedom. Someone who did what you did would be dead by now in most parts of the world. Your type just doesn’t understand that prison is the proof of the truth of our democracy. Otherwise, I’d be driving your hearse!”

  All his thoughts are heavily weighted by memories of Arthur. It’s a thinking that makes him feel good. Opportunity, that was Arthur’s favorite word. He so often said—to white people and black people, to everyone—that “In America blacks have opportunity. They don’t have that anywhere else. In America a black could and I say will someday become president. Look at me, working for the FBI! Sure there are problems but do you know of another country where the opportunities so outweigh the problems? What other country could pass so much critical legislation as fast as ours has?”

  “Young man, you just got to read the Constitution more often.” I’d bet Arthur would say that to this guy and probably draw out a thumb-worn paperback copy of the Constitution—a stack of which he always kept stashed in his briefcase—and read it to him, even behind the bars!

  “It’s the balance of powers, that’s what makes it work, and that’s where you’ve gone all wrongheaded. You must trust the balance of powers, that’s for certain.” Arthur, ah, Arthur, he had the Flag tattooed on his soul! What a guy!

  As the agent opines and muses, Jared quietly basks in the visual beauty of Minnesota’s Highway 61. Any time in County is tomb time, so he’s sitting back, letting the sun-bright farmland images wash over and seep into him. It is a wisp of humor that he enjoys, the fact that “Highway 61” was one of Bob Dylan’s early albums.

  So much anti-war Resistance and radical counterculture germinated in Minnesota, a fact that always amazes him. A provincial East Coaster by birthright, the Midwest had been a rude awakening in his late teen years when his dad had been transferred. The summers are ghastly, allergy-infested and mosquito-dominated. And the winters—winter! God must have invented Minnesota to prove that people could live even when their brains are frozen! How Jared hates the stark clarity of below-zero cold. He certainly could live without a Minnesota winter. But at this moment he enthusiastically professes love for every cow and every barn, every car on the road and every mile of the highway.

  As to this Fed driving him to Millston, “What do you think about the students killed at Kent State?”

  “My view on that will be different from yours. But I have access to information you don’t.”

  “C’mon, for Christ’s sake, they were murdered by the National Guard!”

  “Wrong, just deadhead wrong. Believe me, you just don’t get the full picture.”

  Jared shakes his head at this nonsense. “Okay, who did it?”

  The guy turns, a rather “typical American” guy—his travel bag in the backseat names him John Brown, someone you could see at home, see framed by a split-level picture window, with a beer and a cheeseburger watching TV, but in better shape than most of his middle-aged cohorts—turns and asks, as if his question is the answer, “Who do you think shot Kennedy?”

  “This is your answer? Your question is the answer?”

  “Yessir, that’s it. That’s my answer!” The agent smiles and accelerates the car.

  What does he mean by that? That they have a common killer? Some kind of conspiracy? That’s so far out I can’t believe it! Jared wants to probe a bit more.

  “Kennedy . . . King . . . Bobby . . . were all shot by some right-wingers, you can bet on that,” Jared says confidently as if his conclusion is not to be doubted.

  The agent looks in the rearview mirror and then side to side, forces a laugh.

  “No one is listening, not even a space bird can pick us up out here at this speed. So kid, let me set you straight. You’ll not be talking to anyone for a while, at least not anyone I have to worry about.”

  He slows down for effect. Once more glances up and down the highway then pauses a hard moment to look Jared squarely in the eye.

  “The Chinese,” he says without expression.

  “The Chinese?”

  The agent is amused by Jared’s incredulity. He lets him dangle for several minutes and then turns the screw. “You’ve got to understand that nothing, nothing happens today that isn’t a part of foreign policy. I mean nothing. Mao believes that to bring down democracy and capitalism he must ‘heighten the contradictions.’ Are you familiar with the way these yellow bastards think? What do you know about their Cultural Revolution? They’re an ancient culture but they haven’t learned much.”

  Jared is too flabbergasted to go on. Maybe he’s putting me on? God, he’d love Aaren! Jared chuckles beneath his breath. Wh
at does he think about me? What the hell, ask him! He has nothing to lose. To emphasize his point, Jared starts shaking his legs and arms, making Kindergarten music with his full-body chains and handcuffs.

  “What do you think of me? How dangerous am I?”

  This is easy for the agent to answer. He pigeonholed Jared and his type long ago. “You’re just dupes. Sorry to have to say that but a sparrow is a sparrow and not an eagle. You never had a chance. The schools have been out of control for too long and you just did what you learned. I think prison will set you right.” In his mind he continues, I think prison will make you more like Arthur. He likes that thought.

  They stop talking. Each withdraws into his own reverie. Like it or not, the agent finds himself falling into that feeling he dreads, the mood-shift that drops him into low gear as soon as he passes the final road sign, “Millston, FCI 3 miles.” The Institution. God, how he dislikes that name. He can sense his own mouth getting a little bit drier every time he walks through the steel gates. When one set shuts behind him and the other one hasn’t opened yet, just for an exotic moment, he is caged. His chest tightens and always he wheezes and coughs. This is what he so dislikes about this special mission, Operation Gag, where he has to play taxi driver to all kinds of political weirdoes, so-called political prisoners, radicals and revolutionaries. His only consolation is that he’s not on the Inside detail. I don’t know if I could ever work Inside, undercover. Never! He is sure he’d never get used to it.

  This worries him. Why do I react this way? Does it reveal a hidden weakness? After all he served valiantly in World War II and withstood the satanic temptations that the cruelest acts of the human heart summoned. If there has ever been a case for the existence of the Devil and the reality of evil, it was at Treblinka. He could never forget that place. He’d been sent as the Corps’ representative on a special intelligence taskforce. He was to discern what motivated the Nazis on a day-to-day basis. Why the camp inmates did not revolt.

  Hard as he tried, he could never shake off the contagion of the place, that sense of power—the power to crumple souls whose bodies would fall like ashes through his fingers. Power that lingered on the barbed wire. It was the temptation conjured by the pathetic—men and boys weaker than the weakest patient, slaves for anyone with a strong tongue. With a snap of his fingers, they lived . . . or they died! Women and girls with just one flush of beauty left in their souls, beauty that he could suck dry with a single effortless inhale. Beauty crushed by the faintest breeze. Ah, the ultimate sexual enticement, females as disposable as trash!

  Walking through the camp he staggered with this burden of the gods. To see those shrunken, living corpses—ash people!—was to see a great darkness only a few would ever see. Yet at that time he also felt within a greater Light that even fewer would ever feel. “Everyone should go there,” he would repeatedly tell friends, “then you’ll understand Hitler and why so many followed him.” Entering the Institution always stirs up this memory. He’s forever asking himself Why? But no answer comes.

  The Institution. Agent Brown never doubts his own courage. Time and again events have underscored the quality of his character. But being captured and caged evokes instinctual fears that ensure he will be forever deterred to the right side of the law. “If push comes to shove,” he has said to himself within his dream but never out loud, “I will be the executioner, not the victim.”

  It strikes him how good, most definitely, prison will be for this fellow. He’s someone who can be rehabilitated—a middle-class kid who’s taken free speech too far. Too much of this hippie free love. Too many young men and women swearing and using indecent language. Surely, the Institution will get to someone with his background. Without a doubt, this fellow is in for a big shock.

  Millston’s Tower comes into view, just over the tree tops. Higher than high, gun barrels glinting in the sun, it’s an anchor to walls and fences crowned by thick rolls of barbed wire. The Tower never fails to terrorize. It’s both symbol and the real presence of omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.

  “Looks like the road to the seminary.”

  What? … Without a doubt, an oddball. But all this will soon be over, and I’ll be home before dark.

  Agent Brown is waved through by the Tower guards. His routine is short and swift. Deliver the Assignment. Sign some papers. Pick up the waist-chains and cuffs. Then, bingo! Home free.

  Delivered, the agent looks forward to spending some time in town at the Bashful Viking Bar and Grill. Spend a bit of time with a few locals he’s gotten to befriend after these PC runs. Probably, as usual, he’ll take out the Bible tonight and read—no, he’ll pray tonight over the phone with his wife, for Arthur.

  He almost knows Psalm 23 by heart. “Even though I walk through the shadow of death, I fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” This is his favorite part. This he knows he’ll read tonight, for as often as he has heard it read at funerals while in the Corps, still it brings difficulty to his voice and damp wetness to his eyes as he bows to the mystery of death and all the weakness it cloaks him with.

  For sure, tonight I’ll call Betty and read the psalm and pay my respects to a fine brother. And say an extra prayer for this young man who once had such great promise—that the Institution will teach him to value America and its Christian ways like Arthur did.

  So it begins. Jared exits the car, exits from profane, everyday time and enters the sacred space and extra-ordinary time: Inside. As at Treblinka and other holy sites where the gods of cruelty celebrate their rituals of violence, somewhere deep within the Inside, an altar of sacrifice is being prepared for him.