Authors: John M. Del Vecchio
“Zookie! Zookie, that bitch with the neck tattoo?!”
“The kid could be anybody’s,” Tony had stammered.
Linda yelped. “That’s not the point! Get out!”
He’d withdrawn, shaking, more upset at Linda’s reaction to the paternity suit than to the suit itself, not understanding Linda’s reaction was not to the suit at all but to his admission of liaison with someone she’d met, someone she loathed.
Tony put his hands to his head, massaged his temples. Things had been going so well for them. On August 11th Jo had taken Gina and Michelle, and Tony had taken Linda to Philadelphia for a beer at the EM Club where they’d met eleven years earlier, then to dinner and dancing and an evening at the Hilton Hotel. The girls were now nine years old. Linda’s career was established. Tony had been in Mill Creek Falls for four years, back with Linda for two, more stable and secure with every passing month. They’d begun talking, tentatively, about another child. “I’m thirty,” Linda had said. “If we’re going to have another, it should be pretty soon.” Tony, one of four brothers, had been dreaming about a son. Then the summons and papers and a demand for $12,000 in back support had arrived.
“I’m gonna ...” Tony mumbled. He rolled on the cot. “Goddamn pig! If those motherfuckers ... Kid’s probably Gaylord’s. Could be anybody’s. If they tie it to me that’s it. I’m gone. I’m on the Harley. I’m outta here. I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna work the rest of my life for some pig and her kid. Shit! When the hell was that. Five years ago? Six?” He hit his forehead with the palm of his hand.
Cut me a huss. All night his heart had been pounding, jarring him as he lay on the firm bunk. Finally he’d stammered to himself, “How would Bobby handle this? Could it actually be mine? I gotta maintain. I gotta main-fuckin-tain.”
Through the heavy door the shouting above was muffled.
Tom Van Deusen had been up early that morning. He was sitting at the drawing table in Grandpa’s office. Spread before him was the schematic for a domestic hot water and space heating system. The solar heat collection loop was in black; the space heating loop including five radiant floor zones was in red; domestic hot water was in green; and incoming cold was blue. Domestic hot water and space heating each had separate two-stage storage tanks and heat-exchanger coils; for all loops combined there were eight pumps. Bobby had taken one look at it the day before and had said, “More complicated is not more sophisticated. We’re looking for simple, inexpensive, elegant solutions.”
“Right,” Tom had answered. Right, he now thought. Atop the schematic he laid a blank sheet. On the first line he wrote, “Bechtel’s Energy Cell.” Then he diagrammed a soccer field, sketched in positions, inserted player’s names. On Sunday the 26th, The Energy Cell was scheduled to play Rock Ridge’s Pulaski Club.
Van Deusen startled. “What the fuck’s that?!”
The reaction at the dam was similar. They too were taken totally by surprise.
An hour earlier they had set out from the big barn; six of them in rucksacks with two-day resupplies; led by Don Wagner in his old red plaid shirt and bright orange pants (designed purposefully to interrupt old mental associations); with Rick MacIntyre at slack; followed by balding Kevin Rifkin, “Blue Dog” when he was with the 1st Cav; then Juan Varga, who’d served with the 4th Infantry Division; Joe “Doc Trash” Forbes, 1st of the 5th Mechanized; and Dave “Bro” Bailer, 3d Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.
Their progress was slow. Legless Rick used his arms and thickly gloved hands to raise his torso, then swing his body forward, rhythmically banging out three-foot steps. The Corps had once fitted him with prosthetic devices but he’d found them slow, confining.
“We’ll break on the dam,” Wagner said. The morning was cool, crisp. It had rained violently the night before, then snapping gusts had blown the storm from the Endless Mountains almost as if the winds were blowing the hot, hazy summer away and bringing an October day. Wagner noticed the transformation on the trees of the woods they were about to enter. Overnight, scattered leaves had turned yellow, some had already dropped, here and there splotches of red had erupted. Don thought it was too early, felt it was an omen of a long, hard winter.
Juan Varga fidgeted. Water crashed through the spillway. Varga was a city dweller. The water rush unnerved him, the woods terrified him. “I can’t sleep in the dark, Man,” he whispered to Bailer.
“Me neither, Man,” Bailer said. They were sitting on the dam leaning against their rucksacks. “This dumb. I ... you know, Man, I thought we’d jus de-tox like at the VA. We goin in there.” Bailer lifted his head toward the trailhead and the woods. He too was a city dweller. The gap, the Pennamite Camp, the fire circle meant nothing to him. And to him Wagner’s
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were Mickey Mouse Boy Scout bullshit.
Refkin broke out smokes, passed his pack. MacIntyre shook his head. “Can’t, Blue Dog. I gotta keep my wind.” Rick shifted. The trek over the knoll was hard on him and he could feel the pain in his legs that were not there. “If I do that, I can’t keep my upper bod in shape and I can’t do what I’m doing now.”
The four newbies lit up. “Shee-it,” Bailer whispered to Varga, “I aint done humped since ’66. Fall a ’66. Jus fore the monsoon hit. We moved ... we was like near Da Nang ... we moved up with the others and we run smack into an NVA regiment. One moh fuck-over, Man. Jus one moh.”
Most of the vets who’d arrived in ’79 believed being a veteran of the war in Southeast Asia was a terrible blot upon their character, a stigma that had destroyed their lives. Yet they identified with that period more strongly than with any other. They projected their “stigma” like a giant scarlet
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.
“You been fucked, huh?” MacIntyre said flatly.
Bailer’s eyes jerked to Rick. He glared. He hadn’t meant for anyone but Varga to hear his comment. He looked away. “Yeah,” he said. “Fucked royal.”
“By Nam, huh?” MacIntyre said.
“Yeah.” Bailer was defensive. He tried to act cool. “You too?”
“No,” MacIntyre said. “Not me.”
Bailer, Forbes, Varga, looked at him warily. Blue Dog didn’t look at all. For them, in this early encounter, it was as if they could not show their recognition of Rick’s condition.
“What?!” MacIntyre blurted. “My legs, Man?”
“You aint got no legs,” Bailer said. His voice was icy, tentative.
“Huh!” MacIntyre lurched. “Hey, you’re right. Hey, who took my legs?” He began to laugh. “Aw, who the fuck needs legs? Maybe it’d be nice. I’m going to tell ya something though. No matter what your experience, wounded or not, physical or mental, you’ve gained something by having been there. Seeing what you saw—what no one else in this country has seen—makes you a deeper person than those who never went. You just don’t recognize it yet. The more you experienced that place, the more you saw the good and the evil, the corruption that was with our forces and all the other forces too.... Man, once you recognize it as a great teacher, then you’ll understand what you have to offer.
“And to your Nam experience you’ve added the homecoming experience,” Rick continued. “How you were treated. You know from that how to treat others, how not to treat others. And hey! Now you’ve got another experience. You’re experiencing High Meadow and the Brotherhood. That’s something deep, strong, more than most people in their station wagons and ranch houses and bank accounts ever know.”
“Where you comin from, Man?” It was Blue Dog. His eyes flicked furtively to Rick, away.
Doc Trash added, “You sound like that g-g-guy, Wapinski.”
“How come he don’t come?” Bailer asked.
“He’s in the office so much”—Wagner shifted in closer—“or in his car on sales, he’s got no wind for the climb.”
Blue Dog interrupted. “I asked this man”—he gestured toward Rick—“where he comin from.”
“Way down,” MacIntyre answered. “Down below the bottom. Man said to me, ‘Why you here?’ I said, ‘Shit if I know.’” Rick chuckled as he spoke. “He says, ‘What’s your reason?’ I say, ‘Fuck off, hair breath.’ He says, ‘Everybody’s got a reason for being here. Why are you here?’ I begin to answer but he says, ‘Don’t tell me.’ Then he split. Why you here, Blue Dog? Doc? Don’t tell me. I’m not talking here at High Meadow.
Comprende
?”
“I don’t g-get it,” Doc Trash said.
Rick eyed him playfully. “You think you’re the only one, don’t cha? You’re not,” MacIntyre said. “I’ve been down that road. Maybe not exactly the same as you, maybe I hit different potholes, maybe I avoided some scattered clumps a dung from the dung wagon, maybe you stepped in more or less. But it was the same road.”
“Da-da-don’t go minimizing m-m-my feelings”—Doc sputtered bitterly—“ya wa-wa-weird little fucker.”
Wagner’s anger rose like a mortar round launched. He shot up but Rick guffawed so loudly and with such jubilance Wagner dropped back.
From the woods, from the knoll, from the downstream trail, men with rifles emerged. The newbies thought it was part of the exercise.
The first time Ty Mohammed went before the parole board he was turned down. This had little to do with his behavior during his first three and one-half years of incarceration. Indeed, his behavior and attitudes, after the operation and radiation therapy, swung back to the Tyrone Dorsey of San Francisco—back to the man studying his speech, expanding his vocabulary, walking, talking, being proud, reading, learning about the world’s greatest salesman, examining the plight of minorities, their seemingly growing economic divergence from the wealth-path of the mainstream. He did not expound upon his views to the board. He acted the quiet, remorseful, contrite recalcitrant the board most favored. But boards are political. And parole boards are vindictive in the name of social responsibility.
After four years in prison, after his second hearing, Ty Mohammed was paroled on 1 August 1979. It took three additional weeks of complicated exchange and extradition procedures for him to be allowed to return to Pennsylvania. On the morning of 21 August Ty drove a leased gold Cadillac into Mill Creek Falls an hour after local, state and federal agents rendezvoused at the esses near the Old Mill on Mill Creek Road.
Suddenly there was commotion. Clumping on the front porch, then banging on the door. Bobby’s head snapped up. Sara’s instantaneous reaction was anger, interpreting the noise as vets playing grab ass. She was barefoot, not even dressed except for a loose-fitting muumuu her mother had sent her when she’d learned of Sara’s new pregnancy. Commotion erupted in the yard. Sara’s eyes riveted to Bobby, flicked to the back window, then to Paulie and Noah. Josh barked. The back door burst open. Bobby’s heart froze, jolted, raced. Men rushed in. Bobby’s eyes locked on their weapons, pistols, M-16 rifles. Instantly he searched for his own weapon, anything.
“Freeze!”
“Don’t move!”
The voices were hard, harsh, threatening. The men wore black shirts, black pants, black hats.
Bobby exploded forward between Sara and the men. “What the hell are you—”
One man grabbed him. Outside there was shouting, screaming, cursing. Sara plucked Paulie from the high chair. A second man smashed Bobby behind the knees with a club, the first hammered him down with a pistol butt on his collar bone, then held the pistol, cocked, barrel on Bobby’s temple. “Freeze!” Josh barked viciously, leaped, his old dog legs barely getting traction on the floor. Immediately he was clubbed across the nose, knocked to the floor.
“Don’t move!”
“Don’t move!”
Paulie shrieked.
Noah was frozen rigid in the living room, watching the men hit his father, hold a gun to his father’s face, his father on his knees, his mother holding his shrieking brother, another man with a rifle leveled on them, his dog on the floor before him, between him and the others, bleeding from the nose, twitching. Men yelling things he didn’t understand, three now on his father, pushing, frisking even though his father had on but a T-shirt and sweatpants. Then men grabbed his mother, grabbed his brother. More men came. Noah couldn’t see them wrench his father’s arms behind him, handcuff his father, handcuff too his mother. Armed men darted by him, rushed the stairs, leap-frogged forward, up, frightened someone upstairs would fire on them.
There was no break in the motion. Sara was now down, kneeling, trying to reach Paulie, frantic, trying to see Noah. They’d been caught so off guard, so unaware, then were so dumbstruck by the assault, there was no time for thought, no concept of what was happening, how to resist.
More men spread through the house, secured it room by room. In the kitchen Bobby’s ankles were shackled.
“You’ve got the right to remain ...”
A deafening blast erupted from the roof of the barn. In the kitchen, agents lurched, dropped to the floor, one smashed Bobby. One plowed Sara over, knelt on her. In the living room Noah peed. All over High Meadow noises, shouts, banging, could be heard amid the deafening shriek of the air-raid siren.
“Here’s the search warrant!”
Bobby still did not know who the men were. He was furious. What was happening was just beginning to come together, to form a pattern in his mind.
“... probable cause ...”
Sara was lifted, led to the other room. Bobby was turned to face the kitchen cabinet below the sink, unable to see where they had taken his wife and children, unable to see out of the room, out of the windows.
“... stipulates any and all terrorist documents, explosives, weapons, military equipment ... may be seized ... additionally any military plans, electronic schematics for detonation ... axes, saws ... bombs, gas masks ... additionally all children ... probable cause ...”
Bobby pulled at the cuffs, seething, exploding, “Who the fuck are you?! What the fuck are you doing?!”
“Shut up. Where are the weapons?”
“What weapons?!”
“And the tunnels? Where are the tunnels? You better cooperate.”
In the barn library Sherrick too was caught off guard. It wasn’t unusual to have supply trucks coming and going all day, to have relatives visit, to have the farm or EES vehicles leaving this early. But the noises had been different. As he’d come onto the main barn floor he’d been greeted with, “Put your hands up! Don’t move! Hands on your head! Take four steps forward.”