Yet something was going on.
Twin beams illuminated the yard, and Donny, with his unusually good eyesight, could make out a van with its lights on, a shroud of dust, and two men who were in the process of moving heavy packages of some sort out from the barn into the van by the light of the headlamps.
“I think that’s Trig,” Donny said. “I don’t know who the other guy is.”
“Shall we go down?”
Donny was suddenly unsure.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.”
“He’s helping his friend load up.”
“At this hour?”
“Well, he’s an irregular guy. The clock doesn’t mean much to him.”
That was true; Trig wasn’t your nine-to-fiver by any interpretation.
“All right,” said Donny. “We’ll walk down there. But you hang back. Let me check this out. Don’t let them see you until we figure what’s happening. I’ll call you in, okay? I’m just not feeling good about this, okay?”
“You sound a little paranoid.”
He did. Some hint of danger filled the air, but he wasn’t sure what it was, what it meant, where it came from. Possibly, it was the mere strangeness of everything, the way nothing really made any sense. Possibly it was his own fatigue, raw after the many hours on alert.
They headed down the hill, and Donny detoured them around the house, until at last they came upon the two men from the rear. Donny could see them better now, both working in jeans and denim shirts. They were loading by wheelbarrow immensely awkward sacks of fertilizer into the van, packing it very full, AMMONIUM NITRATE, the sacks said. Dust that the wheelbarrow tires ripped up from the ground filled the air, floating in large, shimmering clouds, which shifted through the beams of the truck lights and in the yellower light that blazed from the barn door. It lit wherever it could, coating the truck, the men, everything. Both Trig and the other man wore red bandannas around their faces.
Pushing Julie back into the dark, Donny stepped out and approached, coughing at the stuff in the air as it filled his mouth and throat with grit. He stepped farther; nobody noticed him.
“Trig?” he called.
Trig turned instantly at his name, but it was the other man who reacted much faster, turning exactly to Donny, his dark eyes devouring him. He had a full, tangled web of blond hair, much thicker than Trig’s, and was large and powerful next to Trig’s delicacy. They looked like a poet and a stevedore standing next to each other.
“Trig, it’s me, Donny. Donny Fenn.” He stepped forward a little hesitantly.
“Donny, Jesus Christ, I didn’t expect you.”
“Well, you said to come on out.”
“I did, yeah. Come on in. Donny, meet Robert Fitzpatrick, my old friend at Oxford.”
“Halloo,” said Robert, pulling off his own bandanna to show a smile that itself showed a mouthful of porcelain spades, a movie star’s gleam of a smile. “So you’re the war hero, eh? We’ve hopes for you, that we do! Need boyos like you for the movement. We’ll stop this bloody thing and get the west field covered in horseshit and ammonium nitrate, if I’m a judge of things. Roll up your sleeves, boy, and get to work. We could use some back. Me goddamned pickup broke down and I’m stuck with this piece of shit to git the stuff out to the spreader. We’re doing it at night to beat the heat.”
“Robert, he’s been on some kind of alert for seventy-two hours. He can’t do manual labor,” Trig said.
“No, I—”
“No, we’re almost done. It doesn’t matter.”
“You left so suddenly.”
“Ah, one more demonstration. I was worn out. What did it prove? I’ve lost my will for the movement.”
“You’ll get your will back, boyo,” said the giant Fitzpatrick heartily. “I’ll go get us a beer for the recharge. You wait here, Donny Fenn.”
“No, no, I just had a thing I wanted to talk over with Trig.”
“Oh, Trig’ll steer you right, no doubt about it,” he said, his voice light with laughter. “It’s a drink I’ll be gittin’, Trig. You lads talk.”
With that he turned to the house and headed in.
“So what is it, Donny?”
“It’s Crowe … they arrested him. Violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I’m supposed to testify against him in” — he looked at his watch — “about seven hours.”
“I see.”
“Maybe you don’t. I was asked to spy on him. That was my job. That’s why I got close to him. I was supposed to report to them on his off-base activities and try and put him with known members of the peace groups. That’s why I was with him at the party that night; that’s why I came to your party. I was ordered to spy.”
Trig stared at him for a while, then his face broke into the oddest thing: a smile.
“Oh, that’s your big secret? Man, that’s it?” He laughed now, really hard. “Donny, wise up. You work for them. They can ask you to do that. If they say so, that’s your duty. That’s the game in Washington these days. Everybody’s watching everybody. Everybody’s got an agenda, a plan, an idea they’re trying to push or sell. I don’t give a damn.”
“It’s worse. They have some idea you were Weather Underground and you planned the whole thing. I mean, can you imagine anything so stupid? He was feeding you deployment intelligence so the May Tribe could humiliate the Corps.”
“Boy, their imagination never fails to amaze me!”
“So what should I do, Trig? That’s what I’m here to ask. About Crowe. Should I testify?”
“What happens if you don’t?”
“They’ve got some pictures of me smoking dope. Funny, I don’t smoke dope anymore, but I did to get in with him. They could send me to Portsmouth. Or, more likely, the ’Nam. They could ship me back for a last go-round, even though I’m short.”
“They’re really assholes, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“But that’s neither here nor there, is it? This isn’t about them. We know who they are. This is about you. Well, then it’s easy.”
“Easy?”
“Easy. Testify. For one reason, you can’t let them get you killed. What would that prove? Who benefits from the death of Lochinvar? Who wins when Lancelot is slain?”
“I’m just a guy, Trig.”
“You can’t give yourself up to it. Somebody’s got to come out on the other side and say how it was.”
“I’m just … I’m just a guy.”
People were always insisting to Donny that he was somehow more than he really was, that he represented something. He’d never gotten it. It was just because he happened to be good-looking, but underneath he was just as scared, just as ineffective, just as simple as anyone else, no matter what Trig said.
“I don’t know,” said Donny. “Is he guilty? That would matter.”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is: you or him? That’s the world you have to deal with. You or him? I vote him. Any day of the week, I vote him.”
“But is he guilty?”
“I’m no longer in the inner circle. I’m sort of a roaming ambassador. So I really don’t know.”
“Oh, you’d know. You’d know. Is he guilty?”
Trig paused.
Finally he said, “Well, I wish I could lie to you. But, goddammit, no, no, he’s not guilty. There is some weird kind of intelligence they have at the top; I just get glimmerings of it. But I don’t think it’s Crowe. But I’m telling you the truth: that doesn’t matter. You should dump him and get on with your life. If he’s not guilty of that, he’s guilty of lots of other stuff.”
Donny looked at Trig for a bit. Trig was leaning against the fender of the van. He lifted a milk carton and poured it over his head, and water gushed out, scraping rivulets in the dust that adhered to his handsome face. Trig shook his wet hair, and the droplets flew away. Then he turned back.