Audrey had been a woman of moods. In depressed hours she might snap at Mackenzie but it was a keep-away snap, not a preamble to a fight.
Sudden memory kicked in him. The five of them—and Duggai.
Audrey had not always been a somber girl but there’d been shadows here and there. They’d been married nearly ten years by the time he first met Shirley and Jay. By then it had led to the inevitable disenchantment but not beyond it—they’d still liked each other.
Audrey thought she had some Indian blood too: a great-great-grandfather or something. Once they’d gone to a cowboys and Indians movie and she’d winked at him afterward: Well we pret’ near won that one. She’d had a job then as factotum to a producer of TV commercials in San Francisco; Mackenzie had been stationed at Fort Ord. A base chaplain had married them and six months later he’d been transferred to West Germany and she’d had to quit the job. That had been the first obvious wedge.
After that he’d done tours in all parts of the world: Walter Reed and Fitzsimmons; the racketing madness of Tokyo; the shabby drear of Fort Bliss. By the time he came back from Indochina to the Presidio in San Francisco—1970—they weren’t yet estranged but they were like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while and had lost touch. It wasn’t so much that they inhabited different worlds—they inhabited the same world but different aspects of it. The view from beneath was a view in the dark: his last tour in Saigon had been an exercise in hopeless idiocy and he’d lost some of his capacity to enjoy things. They’d gone on trying to behave as if nothing had happened but there was a constraint between them that hadn’t been there before. Mackenzie had changed: his soul viewed things with repugnance, the laughter had gone out of him.
Then they’d assigned Duggai to him.
The army had taken Duggai out of his freshman university year because he was failing most of his courses and couldn’t sustain his draft deferment. To the extent that Mackenzie came to know him—it was never very far—it appeared Duggai must have been an amiable indifferent youth, a kind of red-skinned plowboy whose aspirations tended toward hunting, casual sex and the consumption of beer. A counselor in the reservation high school had inflamed Duggai’s parents with ambitions for the boy—lift him out of the reservation rut, give him a chance to make something of himself in the modern world; Duggai had packed off to Tucson and found himself lost in the academic grind.
Duggai was a born marksman, lifelong hunter, and when he scored at the top of his basic-training rifle class the army put him through a series of combat specialist schools designed to make a wizard killer of him. Race mythology to the contrary Duggai didn’t seem to have any particular warrior instincts; all he had was docile pliability—that and his uncanny skill with a rifle. He was indifferent to the power of authority but tended toward mindless obedience as the line of least resistance.
He had been shipped to Vietnam with a special combat team of saboteurs and snipers. He never exceeded the rank of private first class. He was equipped with a backbreaking assortment of telescopic and infrared accoutrements; his job was to kill people at incredibly long ranges or at night or in monsoons. In one of their sessions he mentioned offhandedly to Mackenzie that he’d assassinated one Cong officer in a fine drizzle at a distance they later stepped off to confirm it: “Eight hundred seventy-five yards. That’s over half a mile, Captain.”
Certain villages in the boonies tended to be friendly during the day and unfriendly at night when the Cong would infiltrate and receive the clandestine embrace of the villagers, sack and pillage whatever supplies the village had conned out of the Americans, then drain away into the jungle before daybreak. To pacify such villages the army assigned mechanics like Duggai to lie in ambush with infrared scope and silenced rifle—to pick off everything that moved in the village after midnight.
In therapy Duggai always skirted the details but Mackenzie forced him to go over the ground innumerable times in the course of several months. He judged that Duggai must have murdered more than a hundred Vietnamese from the night. Vietnamese people were very small to the eyes of a hulk like Duggai; women and men wore the same loose pajamas in the rural areas. Duggai was aware of the fact that a good number of his victims had been women and children and very old people: the heat image on an infrared scope seldom reveals the sex or age of the target.
Duggai had done his work with unquestioning obedience but nothing in his upbringing had steeled him to it and the nights of silent murder had a cumulative effect on even so rudimentary a psyche as Duggai’s. He began to disturb his tentmates with his nightmares. The nightmares trickled across into his waking hours: he hallucinated. As the subconscious rebelled, so the efficiency deteriorated. Finally Duggai was put into a base hospital for observation. The case had been kicked back up the line until finally he had been rotated back to San Francisco for major psychiatric overhaul. The department had implanted him in Mackenzie’s care because all Indian patients were assigned to him: something about empathy.
Duggai had a peculiar intellect. His aptitude tests showed extremely high scores on anything to do with simple logic, practical things, mechanics. Mackenzie tried to teach him chess—he seemed to have the attributes for it—and Duggai learned the game quickly but he played only when Mackenzie badgered him into it. Left to himself Duggai chose isolation. In the ward he could sit in a chair and stare at a point on the wall for hours.
School and army records indicated he had formed no friendships and few acquaintanceships. He was not paranoid; he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. He did not relate to other people at all; he seldom seemed to care what they thought or felt. It was as if they didn’t exist. To an extent he was a textbook psychopath isolated in solipsism. This was the most difficult syndrome to treat because the patient left no bridge open across which the therapist could approach him. There was no inner demand to make contact with another human. Duggai usually seemed aware of the existence of other people only to the extent that they annoyed or offended him or got in his way. He’d been reasonably polite to Mackenzie because he’d seen Mackenzie as his ticket out of the place but that was all.
Such patients had no curiosity about other people; it followed they also lacked any curiosity about themselves. The army’s psychiatric services packed in a great many Duggais—some of them suicidal, some incoherent; you couldn’t brainwash a farm boy into committing atrocities and expect it to have no effect on him afterward. But with a Duggai there was no possibility of goading the patient into insight. Feelings were to be obeyed and indulged but never examined.
There’d been no reaching Duggai. Because of the twitch of a government digit somewhere he’d been discharged—from the hospital and from the army—and Mackenzie had been relieved to see the last of him.
But then Duggai had gone brass-scavenging in the Mohave Desert; men had died; the change of venue brought the trial to San Francisco; and a bored defense attorney, court-appointed, went through the motions by seeking out psychiatric buttresses for his “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense. Mackenzie came forward willingly enough; testified as truthfully as he knew how; again that should have been the end of it.
Duggai—and the appearance at the trial of Earle Dana as an expert witness—had brought the rest of them together. Jay Painter initially came into it as a witness for the prosecution but his examination of Duggai bore out the results of Mackenzie’s and the prosecution declined to call Jay to the stand. When Duggai’s attorney learned of this he brought Jay over to the defense team.
Mackenzie met Jay for the first time in the courtroom.
Jay had asked Shirley to interview Duggai because it had occurred to him that Duggai might open up more with an attractive woman. Duggai hadn’t but the defense attorney, eager for all the help he could get, persuaded her to testify. The three of them were in court that day and afterward they went out to dinner. There was some speculation around the restaurant table about the fourth defense witness—a psychotherapist they’d all heard of, Earle Dana, regarded generally as a publicity hound and a quack. Their own testimony was concluded but they agreed to meet next morning in the courtroom to listen to Earle Dana.