The Trinity (7 page)

Shivering because of the cold and his nerves, he clumsily lights a cigarette and starts walking to no place in particular, dragging his luggage in the snow behind him, his sailor suit askew. He looks entirely out of place walking through these suburban streets where no one walks during the winter.

Everyone he knows has a home, in the Navy and otherwise, a place where you can always go back to, an anchor in an often-goofy world. In the Navy, you are required to have a home of record, typically your parents’ home or a relative’s. Chris no longer has a home. He is truly a child of the Navy, and home is wherever he is required to hang his seabag.

In this instance, home will soon be Scotland.

He remembers the cluster of hotels near the shopping mall a few miles away and starts walking along the busy road. Many drivers strain their necks to see the unusual looking young man.

He checks into a room for the night, blankly staring at the television for most of the evening, not sure how to spend the next two weeks.

When the morning comes, he checks out of the hotel and has the clerk call him yet another cab. This time he finds a Greyhound bus terminal. He purchases a ticket for New York. His flight to Scotland will connect through La Guardia, so he would just as soon hang out for two weeks in a place other than Detroit, and New York is a city he has wanted to visit after hearing his friend Mahler talk incessantly about Woody Allen and all things New Yorkish. He will try to find his friend, who is probably still on leave, before reporting to San Diego.

What would be twelve hours in a car is nearly twenty in a bus. The bus stops at every town and city of size, with a parade of bizarre people coming and going, some carrying no luggage at all, and some their life’s possessions stuffed into wrinkled and bulging trash bags.

Again, Chris is traveling, and his glances into the various towns and the landscape of the Ohio Turnpike and onto the rolling hills and low mountains of Pennsylvania provide a welcome relief from the thought of no longer having a home.    

Many passengers come and go on his journey; many have occupied the seat next to him. Many try to talk to him, especially because of the uniform, asking him where he’s going, where he’s been, and where he’s from.

Chris answers in one- and two-word responses; he is not in the mood for elaboration or conversation.

The parade of people coming and going off the bus is somewhat illuminating for Chris. Though he didn’t grow up wealthy, his needs were met and he lived in comfort. On the bus, some carry trash bags for luggage, some have nicer luggage, some have dirty clothes, and some have clean clothes and dirty hands and dirty faces.

Ultimately, the bus arrives in New York mid-morning, two days before Christmas, and deposits Chris in the Port Authority terminal in lower Manhattan. The vastness of the bus station pales in comparison to the vastness of the city outside. Chris can do nothing at first but stare straight up at all the buildings framing the sky.

Then he turns his attention to the sidewalks, the streets, surging with cars and buses and trucks and people, an overwhelming wave of hurried people.

He is scared, more scared than he ever was in boot camp.

But he is excited. This is the world he longed to see. He feels years removed from high school classrooms and life in front of television screens.

He wanders, staring at the people and the streetlights and all the Christmas decorations in the storefronts. The sight of Christmas at first warms him, but then makes him feel sad. Christmas was never particularly special in his household. His mother would drag him and his brother to his grandparents’ house, but as they got older, it was mainly a day for sleeping in and exchanging a gift with their mother.

Even on Christmas, their father never ventured from the basement, and Chris could hear the noise of the television from late in the morning till very late at night.

He decides to try to find his friend Mahler, and knowing he lives on Staten Island, he tries to make his way there.

He tries to catch a taxi, but a taxi is hard to come by in New York at Christmastime.

But because of his uniform and the scared and pathetic look on his face, a cab driver eventually stops and picks him up. He takes Chris through the financial district and drops him off at the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry at Battery Park.

He sits on that boat in a cluster of miserable commuters and tourists from around the world. Chris hears a cacophony of accents and languages. He drops his belongings at his feet, thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his pea coat, and pushes his sailor’s hat down on his forehead, resting it on the top of his thick gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

It is his first time on a boat. He feels at home. The thrill of travel has returned, even though he is not sure of his immediate destination.

The sights from the ferry are at first breathtaking: the Statue of Liberty, that American image that he has seen depicted a million times growing up, the Brooklyn Bridge, the skyline of lower Manhattan with the World Trade Center towers rising majestically over every building

He thinks briefly of his mother and father. He lights a cigarette and looks at the industrial New Jersey shoreline to the west, full of nothing but iron and steel and concrete, and the Brooklyn shoreline to the east, residential, almost bucolic compared to the Jersey shoreline.

After roughly twenty-five minutes and two cigarettes, the ferry deposits him at the north end of Staten Island. The scenery is more suburban, similar to his own native surroundings. He is disappointed. He expected to feel like he was in the middle of a big city.

He walks along the main road and realizes that it is already mid-afternoon and that he hasn’t eaten in nearly two days. He stops at a fast-food restaurant, eats without tasting, barely breathing, and continues walking.

Tired, he stops at the first motel he sees, a rather bland building.

He gets his room and peruses the phonebook. There are many Mahlers listed, and Chris is too introverted to start randomly calling people, looking for his friend. Upset, he turns on the television, removes his uniform and neatly hangs it in the closet. He collapses on the bed and falls asleep. He dreams of his childhood, of a camping trip his parents promised him but never took. In the dream, he loves his mother and looks up to his father and brother. They fish from a dock at the campground. They paddle a canoe.

He awakes at dawn the next morning, the day before Christmas, disappointed that his dream did not lead to a reality and that his current reality is a Christmas without a home in a city he doesn’t know and a life leading god knows where.

He sighs, retrieves the last cigarette from the crushed pack on the nightstand. He scratches his head and turns up the volume of the television, which has stayed on all night. He can’t stand silence. He has not been entirely alone this much in his entire life, and the noise from the television and the brightness of the screen comfort him.     

He still has over a week and a half of leave left, time he had planned on spending in Michigan, exchanging gifts with his family, visiting one or two of his friends, returning to his school in his uniform, as he had seen upperclassmen do in previous years.

No one would have known him anyway, he decides.

He thinks about crying but doesn’t, thinks about shouting but doesn’t, and he shifts his thoughts to how to spend the next eleven days before he is due in Scotland.

He decides to head there early.

He showers, dons his uniform and heads out into the early New York morning, Christmas lights twinkling all around him in that dusky cold and clear sky.

It is a difficult trek to La Guardia, back to the Staten Island Ferry, and then a very expensive cab ride to the international terminal, where he finds the Pan Am counter.

He is able to change his ticket for a flight leaving that day. He checks in his sea bag and garment bag and has seven hours to kill inside the airport. First, he eats a breakfast of a cinnamon roll and soda, and then he purchases some reading material and selects a seat at the gate from which his plane will be departing. He reads the
New York
Times
because he is in New York and he feels that’s appropriate and worldly, even though he has never really read a newspaper, save the comics on the occasional Sunday. He buys a paperback book, some sort of horror story, but he can’t concentrate. He watches the people walking through the terminal, a very cosmopolitan display of people. He has never seen such a variety of cultures and classes, and he finds it fascinating.

And that is how he spends his time: studying the people, guessing where they are from and where they are going.

The late afternoon eventually comes, and he boards the plane that will carry him over the ocean to the parts of the world he has longed to see.

It is the first night home for the baby, a girl named Samantha Marie, born in an Aberdeen hospital to Petty Officer Third Class Frank Beasley and his wife Monica, both from Norfolk, both children of career Navy men. They are a young and handsome and innocent black couple.

Frank is proud to follow in his father’s footsteps, performing the same job as is father, and wearing the same uniform.

The baby is brought to their little cottage inside the village of Lutherkirk, a small structure made of stone, heated solely by a coal-burning fireplace. Monica is nervous and scared. Her family is back in Virginia, and there is no one to help her with the baby, no one to give her advice, no one she can talk to, really, except her husband. And it’s Christmas. That makes the desolation even more intense.

It is about 2 a.m. and the house is silent, as is the village of Lutherkirk. The pubs emptied hours ago, and the village is asleep. The baby has just fallen asleep, and so, too, do Frank and Monica.

No one in the village hears a vehicle rolling quietly through, searching for the Beasley home.

Nor does anyone see the vehicle’s driver and passengers, two young men dressed in black from head to toe, camouflage paint covering their faces.

The vehicle parks about a block away from the Beasley home. The two figures, one portly, the other thin, run to the Beasley home. Each has a can of spray paint. They decorate the front door and stucco exterior of the house with swastikas and “NIGGERS LEAVE” and other vulgarities.

They throw a brick through the front window and dash back to the car before anyone detects them. They have attached a note to the brick:

This is just a warning. Our next visit will end in fatality. Scotland is not the place for the scum of the earth such as you. The white race will reign supreme, but not until the lower races are destroyed. This means
you!

The Eastern Scotland Trinity of the

Great White Brotherhood

The Beasleys run out of their lone bedroom and step on the broken glass in their living room. Frank reads the note and hides it from his wife. A few neighborhood lights flicker on and then off. The night is silent again save Samantha crying loudly and the sound of an Austin Allegro speeding out of the village of Lutherkirk.

Chris’s journey to Scotland consists of a transatlantic flight from New York to London, with a three-hour layover at Heathrow and a connecting flight to Aberdeen.

He will take a cab the thirty miles from Aberdeen to the base in Lutherkirk.

The flight to London is long, long enough for an in-flight movie. Chris feels worldlier still, vaguely glamorous, traveling long and far enough to be entitled to an in-flight movie, a romantic comedy that Chris really doesn’t enjoy, but since he paid three dollars to rent the headset to hear the movie, he suffers through it anyway.

Due to the five-hour time difference between London and New York, it is early morning as Chris arrives at Heathrow. He strains his eyes, trying to catch glimpses of the English landscape through the low and thick early morning cloud cover. He sees nothing but a gray sky and highways and buildings and cars. From the air, it doesn’t look any different than the landscape of his suburban Detroit.