In his bedroom he tried on several of his uniforms which hung, cleaned and pressed, in pine-scented clothes bags. He selected two and tried them on again, pleased to note that the fit was exactly as he liked it except for a break in the line of the trousers, where the cuff edge touched the top of his Bean’s loafers. He wondered with a flash of irritation if his height had been affected by the shrinkage of age. Then he put on a pair of buffed army boots and saw in the full-length mirror that his uniform was as straight and creaseless as if he were about to stand parade.
John Grimes left a sandwich and coffee on a tray in the study, set the phone to the answer tape, and drove the Mercedes to a local garage for a complete engine check, two new front tires, a fill-up and a lube job. The car was to be delivered to the farm that evening since the general would be using it the next day. To the mechanic who drove him back to the farm, Grimes explained in some detail that the general was taking his son’s death pretty hard, was depressed, had to get away.
Later, Grimes drove to the country club, pulled in front of the pro shop and shouted to the golf pro to locate General Weir’s and Mrs. Dever’s golf clubs and load them in the back of the station wagon, along with four boxes of new balls. They were going away for a couple of weeks, he said; the general wanted a complete change of scene, they were driving down to the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs.
Grimes went into the club lounge and took a stool at the end of the bar. There were male foursomes and a scattering of couples, sitting at tables with sandwiches and coffee, watching a track meet on the TV screen. A man in a sports shirt and plaid golf shorts was sipping gin at the bar. For a moment Grimes wondered if the solitary drinker was staring at him, then decided it was an illusion created by the man’s oddly protruding eyes. Tony, the bartender, brought Grimes an ale and asked with genuine concern how the general was doing. Not too good, Grimes told him. He himself had stopped at the club just to get away from the melancholy of the Weir household. It was unlike the general, as Tony would know, Grimes said, but brave and strong as he was, he’d been doing some pretty heavy drinking...
It was Tarbert Weir who was up and about first on the day of Mark’s funeral. He made coffee and toast, scrambled some eggs, and brought a tray to Grimes’ room, leaving it on a bedside table when he heard the running shower. Ten minutes later he brought around the station wagon and waited beside it, motor running, when Grimes came out the back door.
Grimes’ face was flushed with both emotion and a close, straight-razor shave in the hot shower. His body looked constricted and bulky, encased in a new black suit, and there seemed to be no energy in his movements, no trace of hope in his face. “I’m not sure I can do this, sir,” he said, his voice shaking.
Weir put both arms around the man’s shoulders, embracing him and patting him on the back, as if he were comforting a distraught child.
“You can do it, Grimes,” he said. “We both can.”
At eleven o’clock the general switched on a television set to an upstate channel. The weather in Chicago had cooperated, Weir thought bitterly; it was appropriately dismal for the funeral of his son, swirling snow alternating with sleeting rain that struck the funeral cortége like flails. A motorcycle drill team preceded the two hearses, the first limousine carrying floral tributes and then the coffin limo itself, flanked by an honorary guard of marching policemen. The side curtains of the car were drawn back with black ribbon to reveal the coffin itself, draped with an American flag.
“... definitely a two-tone town... the superintendent believes the city needs a show of unity, a catharsis for its emotions.”
Tears of rage clouded the picture for Weir. He snapped off the TV set abruptly and went to the gun cabinet to take out a pair of .22 target pistols and several boxes of ammunition.
Outside, the weather was dry, but cold and almost windless, with a frozen crackle of breaking brush under every footstep. Weir walked away from the house and into the deep woods, grateful for the cold air that nipped his cheeks and filtered through his cashmere sweater.
He took down a couple of log rails to make an opening in the fencing and walked to the outdoor shooting range he and Grimes had set up years ago. It was a two-lane, thirty-foot clearing in the trees, with a rough wooden counter for resting guns and ammo at the top and a straight, open gallery running twenty-five feet ahead. The end of the range was backed by a ten-foot-high wall of wire-baled haycocks and two black and yellow targets with scarlet bull’s-eyes. Beyond the targets lay several more acres of pristine, fenced-in woodland of the Weir property.
General Weir laid out the pair of .22 target pistols and boxes of ammunition with precision, as if awaiting a signal in the championship meet.
He loaded each pistol and began to fire them alternately, left and right hand, the shots cracking out in the cold air. He reloaded and fired again and again for almost an hour, cleanly, rhythmically, feeling the air cool on his fiery cheeks. When he finally put down the pistols and walked to the end of the firing range to look at the targets, the air was thick with the smell of cordite, the circular targets were tattered, with the red bull’s-eyes shot completely away and the hay bales looking as though they had been clawed by a frenzied animal.
They did not wait for John Grimes to get back from Chicago. At a quarter to three, Tarbert Weir went into his bank and converted ten thousand dollars from his account into travelers checks. He told the cashier, whom he knew well, that he was taking a trip down south and she put her hand out from under the grille and touched his hand as he signed the checks, patting it softly, then made a little pursing movement with her lips, a silent kiss of understanding. Weir nodded and thanked her.
Within twenty minutes the big Mercedes left Springfield and moved out into the traffic of the interstate highway, headed across Indiana lo Ohio and then down to White Sulphur Springs on the eastern border of West Virginia, a town of less than three thousand people, two hundred and fifty miles from Washington, D.C.
General Weir sat slouched down in the front seat, head thrown back against the leather cushion, as if he were exhausted or emotionally drained. Laura Devers was at the wheel.
Chapter Twenty-two
At sergeant Malleck’s request, a military intern stopped by the Armory to examine and treat injuries to the face and torso of one Private George Jackson. The young doctor cleaned and bandaged cuts on the face and forehead, treated deep bruises in the rib and groin areas and administered nine stitches to close a gash that ran from the soldier’s left eyelid up through the eyebrow to his temple. Then he medicated and taped the battered rib cage.
“I don’t know what gets into you fellows,” the doctor said to his silent patient, “riding those choppers without a helmet. Look at yourself. You could have lost the sight of an eye if that cut had gone half an inch lower. I did some motocross riding in college and I never got on a bike without a helmet and goggles.”
“You know how it is,” Malleck said easily, “some smart-asses are just too smart to take advice.”
Lasari spent the next forty-eight hours on a cot in the locked back room and then, on orders cut by Malleck, shipped out on a civilian aircraft to Boulder, Colorado, where he and his traveling companion, Private Homer Robbins, were met by military jeep and transported to the bivouac area of the division to which Private George Jackson’s orders assigned him.