It was a beautiful night, temperate and soothing. Donny was dressed in cutoffs, Jack Purcells, a madras shirt, just like half the kids who’d entered the place since he’d been standing there, except that unlike them, his ears stood out and his head wore only a little topside platter of hair. It said jarhead all the way.
But it was the Hawk and Dove where PFC Crowe was known to hang, and so it was at the Hawk and Dove he had been deposited.
Christ, Donny thought again, looking back to Weber and getting another of the whisking motions with the head.
He turned and plunged inside.
The place, as expected, was dark and close and jammed. Rock music pummeled against the walls. It sounded like Buffalo Springfield: There’s a man with a gun over there, what it is ain’t exactly clear—something like that, vaguely familiar to Donny.
Everybody was smoking and cruising. There seemed to be a sense of sex in the air as people eyed one another in the darkness, the pretty young girls from the Hill, the slim young men from the Hill. Nearly all the guys had big puffs of hair, but now and then he spied the whitewalls or at least the very short haired look of the military. Yet there wasn’t much tension; it was as if everybody just put it aside, left it outside for a generous helping of tribal bonding, the young not having to show anything at all in here to the murderous, controlling old.
Donny squeezed to the bar, ordered a Bud, forked over a buck and remembered, “Keep all your receipts. You can expense this. Our office will pick it up. But nothing hard. Bonson will fucking freak if you start chugging Pinch.”
“I’ve never even tasted Pinch,” Donny had replied. “Maybe tonight’s the night.”
“That’s a big negative,” said Weber.
Donny sipped his beer. Beside him, a guy was in the middle of a bitter fight with a girl. It was one of those quiet, muttered things, but very intense. The boy kept saying, under his breath, “You idiot. You unbelievable idiot. How could you let him? Him! How could you let him? You idiot.”
The girl merely stared ahead and smoked.
The time passed. His instructions were clear. He was not to approach Crowe. That would be a mistake. Sooner or later Crowe would see him, Crowe would approach him, and then it would go where it would go. If he threw himself at Crowe, the whole damned thing would fall apart.
Donny had another beer, checked his watch. He scoped the action. There were some attractive chicks but none as cool as Julie, the girl to whom he was engaged. Man, he smiled, I still got the best.
It was the football hero-cheerleader thing, but not really. Yes, he was a football hero. Yes, she was a cheerleader. But he didn’t really like football and she didn’t really like cheerleading. They actually were sort of forced together as boyfriend and girlfriend by peer pressure at Pima County High School, found they didn’t really like each other very much, and broke up. Once they broke up and started hanging out with other people, they missed each other. One night they went on a double date, he with Peggy Martin, Julie’s best friend, and she with Mike Willis, his best friend. And that was the night they really connected. Junior year. The war was far away then, happening on TV. Firefights in places like Bien Hoa and I Drang that he had never heard of. The napalm floating off the Phantoms and wobbling downward to blossom in a huge smear of tumbling fire across the jungle canopy. It meant nothing. Donny and Julie went everywhere that year. They were inseparable. It was, he thought, the best summer of his life, but senior year was better, when he’d led the Southwest Counties League in yardage, averaging close to two hundred a game. He was big and fast. Julie was so beautiful but she was nice, somehow. She was so nice. She was … good was the only word he could think of, and it was so lame.
“Jesus Christ!”
Donny felt a hand on his shoulder as the words exploded into his ear. He turned.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Of course it was Crowe, in jeans and a work shirt looking very proletariat. He had — where the hell did he get that? — a camouflaged boonie cap on to disguise his hair-lessness. He held a beer in his hand and was with three other young men who looked exactly like him except their hair was real, and long. They looked like three Jesuses.
“Crowe,” said Donny.
“I didn’t know this was your kind of place,” said Crowe.
“It’s a place. They have beer. What the fuck else would I need?” Donny said.
“This is my corporal,” Crowe said to his pals. “He’s a genuine USMC hero. He’s actually killed guys. But he’s a good guy. He only made me drop for twenty-five today instead of fifty.”
“Crowe, if you’d learn your shit, you wouldn’t have to drop for any.”
“But then I’d be collaborating.”
“Oh, I see. Fucking up funerals is part of your guerrilla war on the grieving mothers of America.”
“No, no, I’m only joking. But the funny thing is, I can’t tell my left from my right. I really can’t.”
“It’s port and starboard in the Marine Corps,” said Donny.
“I don’t know them either. Well, anyway. You want to join us? Tell these guys about ’Nam?”
“Oh, they don’t want to hear.”
“No, really,” one of the other kids said. “Man, it must be fucking hairy over there.”
“He won a Bronze Star,” said Crowe with a surprising measure of pride. “He was a hero.”
“I was lucky as shit not to get wasted,” Donny said. “No, no war stories. Sorry.”
“Look, we’re going to a party. We know this guy, he’s having a big party. You want to come, Corporal?”
“Crowe, call me Donny off duty. And you’re Ed.”
“Eddie and Donny!”
“That’s it.”
“Come on, Donny. Chicks everywhere. It’s over on C, right near the Supreme Court. This guy is a clerk. He knew my big brother at Harvard. More pussy in one place than you ever saw.”
“You should come, Donny,” said one of the boys. Donny could tell that the hero thing had cut through politics and somehow impressed these war-haters, who just a few years back had been worshiping John Wayne.
“I’m engaged,” Donny said.
“You can look, can’t you? She’ll let you look, won’t she?”
“I suppose,” said Donny. “But I don’t want any Ho Chi Minh shit. Ho Chi Minh tried to kill my ass. He’s no hero of mine.”
“It won’t be like that,” Crowe promised.
“Trig will like him,” one of the boys said.
“Trig will turn him into a peacenik,” said the other.
“So who’s Trig?” said Donny.
It was a short walk and as soon as they were outside, one of the boys pulled out a joint and lit up. The thing was routinely passed around until it came to Donny, who hesitated for a moment, then took a toke, holding it, fighting the fire. He’d had quite the habit for a few months in ’Nam, but had broken it. Now, the familiar sweetness rushed into his lungs, and his head began to buzz. The world seem to come aglow with possibility. He exhaled his lungful.
Enough, he thought. I don’t need more of that shit.
Capitol Hill had the sense of a small town in Iowa, under leafy trees that rustled in the night breeze. Then, through a break in the trees, he suddenly saw the Capitol, its huge white dome arc-lit and blazing in the night.