“We had better talk fast, then. Dennison is probably phoning Butcher right now. He must be at his club, or out to lunch. Otherwise he’d have set the dogs on you.” Again that quick, shaky smile, a smile full of fear, as if Slum knew he was smiling at the wrong thing and would shortly be punished for it. “But he’ll get back fast when he hears from her, and then you’ll get your ass kicked out.”
“What is this? You can’t have visitors? Don’t you have anything to say about it?”
“No,” said Slum.
Sandy scowled. “She says you’re crazy. Chronic depression. Psychotic violence. Is it true? You gone nuts on me, Slum?”
Slum looked down at his thin, bony hands, and giggled. “Crazy,” he said. “I guess I am.” He giggled again. Sandy didn’t like that giggle one bit. “I’m legally incompetent. Butcher had me declared legally incompetent. So that does make me crazy, I guess.” He looked up at Sandy, and the little smile faded. His mouth trembled, and for a moment it looked as though he was going to cry. “Sandy, I am …disturbed. I was real down after I got out of prison. Chronic depression, they called it. They put me in a mental place, gave me electroshock. Therapy, they call it therapy. And Sandy, ever since… well, maybe I’m not so depressed, but it’s like I’m scared, scared they’ll do the shock thing again. And I don’t remember things. Things I ought to remember. It’s like part of my mind is gone. So I guess they’re right. I’m crazy. But it’s their fault, Sandy. It’s Butcher’s fault.” He wrapped his arms around himself and trembled violently.
Sandy felt himself getting more and more angry, but he tried to hold it in check. “What about these psychotic episodes?” he asked. “Are you really violent?”
“After I got out of the hospital the first time and came home, I tried to leave. I wanted to go back to Canada. Butcher wouldn’t let me, so I pulled a knife on him. Kitchen knife. He just walked up and took it away from me and slapped me across the face, told me he knew I was too yellow to use it. He was right, too. That was one of my episodes. Sometimes I get mad and throw things. Last week I smashed Butcher’s Father of the Year cup for 1964. It’s out being repaired. I’m a dangerous maniac, Sandy. A dangerous violent incompetent maniac. I even got to use an electric shaver.” He forced a smile. “It’s real good to see you, Sandy. How’s the old gang? Do you still see them?”
“I haven’t,” Sandy said. “Not for a long time. But just recently, I’ve been seeing them all, one by one, driving across the country. That’s why I’m here.”
“How’s Maggie?” Slum asked. “If you see her again, tell her I think of her a lot, OK?” He looked down at his hands again. “I haven’t been with a woman since prison. I’m impotent. I don’t know if it was the electroshock or the time in jail. Jail was pretty bad. I got raped a bunch of times. It was like it broke something inside me, something strong, that made me me. Rape can do that to you.”
Sandy was aghast. “I don’t believe it! What kind of place were you in? I thought draft evaders got sent to clean little minimum security places where things like that didn’t happen.”
Slum smiled. “No, that’s for the Watergate guys. Oh, maybe some draft dodgers got minimum security, but they didn’t have Butcher for a father. I can’t prove it, but I think he was the one did it to me. The judge was an old fraternity buddy of his. Butcher didn’t want me coddled, thought some hard time would do me good. I spent my time in a maximum security institution, until I freaked out.” He frowned. “When I tell people, when I say that Butcher was the one that did it, they say it just shows how incompetent I am. Paranoid. Blaming my father for everything. He’s the one who turned me in to the police too, when I came back to Mother’s funeral.”
“Are you sure? Not even Butcher—”
“Oh, he’s admitted it. I was a criminal. I had to face up to my crime like a man, take the consequences of my actions. The consequences were about a hundred million cocks up my ass, I guess. At the end I didn’t even struggle.” Now he did have tears in his eyes. “Sandy, why didn’t you come visit? Or write me at least? It was really bad in there, Sandy, I could have used a few friends. I kept hoping that you or Maggie or Froggy would show up. I would even have been glad to see Lark, even though he would have called me a dumbshit. Why didn’t any of you come?” His voice got shrill toward the end.
“Because we didn’t know,” Sandy said. “Were we supposed to read minds, or what? Until a few weeks ago, I thought you were still in Canada. Why didn’t you write when you got into trouble?”
Slum stared. His mouth opened and closed again soundlessly. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” he said in a high, hysterical voice. “Oh, oh, that’s funny, oh, so funny, oh, oh.” He wiped tears from his cheek with the back of his hand. “Sandy,” he said, “I wrote you, oh, three, four times. I wrote Bambi and Froggy too, and even Lark. I wrote Ted and Melody and Anne, everybody I could think of. I wrote Maggie once a week for half a year, until I finally gave up.”
“I don’t get it,” Sandy said. “I never got any letters, and I’m sure the others didn’t, either. They would have called. Even Lark.”
Slum laughed again. “What a joke!” he said. “Of course you didn’t get any letters. Butcher must have had them intercepted. Paid somebody off. The warden, some guards, maybe even someone in the post office, who the hell knows. Maybe all of them. Butcher could afford it. He didn’t want me to associate with you. Not with any of you. You were all bad influences. You turned his son into a commie dope-fiend faggot. He’ll tell you so once he gets home. I was a coward already, he knows that, but I wasn’t a commie dope-fiend faggot until I got to college and fell in with you bad sorts. Oh, I was so stupid. I am incompetent. I should have known. I’m not near paranoid enough, not yet. You can’t be paranoid enough with Butcher around. I thought what he wanted me to think, that you just didn’t care, that you’d never really been my friends at all.” He balled his hands into fists. “Sandy, I want to kill that man. My shrink says that’s very sick, but I want to do it. I wish I had the guts to do it. We got enough weapons around here. Shotguns, rifles, pistols. He’s even got an Uzi and an old bazooka down in the basement.” Slum grabbed an imaginary machine gun and sprayed the room with invisible bullets. “Boom boom boom boom,” he announced loudly. “Blow his fucking head right off, just like in his books. Piss on his coffin. And then rape Miss Dennison. If I could get it up. Shove it right up her ass, that’s where she deserves it.” He giggled. “I told you, Sandy, they’re right.”
Sandy remembered a tall gangling freshman who kept knocking things over and apologizing. He remembered a heavy, hairy sophomore in a suit of a hundred colors, smiling as he listened to Donovan sing “Atlantis” over and over, sitting very still for fear of disturbing the kitten asleep in his lap. He remembered an exile, bearded and muscular, driving nails with smooth precision. He wanted to gag.
Downstairs he heard a door slam, and a huge familiar voice boomed, “Where is he?” A female voice answered, shrill but too soft for Sandy to catch the words, and two pairs of footsteps started up the stairs.
“You’re in trouble now,” Slum said. “He’ll threaten to sic the dog on you, and then promise to shoot you himself. Watch and see. Butcher is as predictable as his plots.”
It was only a moment before Butcher Byrne appeared in the doorway of his son’s room, but Sandy had time to stand and cross his arms and feed his fury. Joseph William Byrne had grown older. His hard leathery face was scored by deep wrinkles and frown lines, and the iron-gray hair was mostly white. He had traded his horn rims for silver aviator frames, and his bush jacket was made of leather instead of khaki. But it still had epaulettes. “Mister Blair,” he said loudly, “you are trespassing in my house. You will remove yourself. Now.”
“I’m visiting my friend,” Sandy said. “Slum, you want me to leave?”
Slum smiled. “Of course not.”
“My son Jefferson is under psychiatric care thanks to friends like yourself. He doesn’t know what’
s best for him. Your visit may already have set his treatment back months or even years. You did this to him, Blair. You and your Jew roommate and that shanty-Irish slut he got involved with. Well, Jefferson is finished with all of you. I have seen to that.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Sandy. “Interfering with the mails is a federal rap, Butcher.”
“Do you intend to leave peacefully or not?” Byrne said.
“Not,” said Sandy.
Butcher actually smiled at that. “Good. I have several dogs on the grounds. All I need do is whistle, and they will see to your permanent removal. Or I could simply shoot you.”
Slum laughed. “Told you so.”
“Do I get my choice?” Sandy asked. “Butcher, you know, you’re a real crock of shit.”
Byrne purpled. A big vein in his forehead began to throb, like a thick blue worm in a feeding frenzy. “If you’re trying to shock me, save your breath. I served in the military, you know—”
“I never would have guessed,” Sandy said.
“—and in the barracks I heard all the four-letter words you know and quite a few others besides. So spare me your vulgar vocabulary.”
“You want vocabulary? Here’s a few words for you, then. Sadist. That’s a good one. Anal-retentive prick. Bastard. Psychotic. Hack. Fascist. Put them all together and they spell BUTCHER.”
Byrne’s vein looked about to burst. “I will not stand here and be called a fascist by a cheap little peacenik punk,” he roared. “I defended this country against the Nazis, I’ll have you know!”
“Oh, yeah. Single-handedly saved all the peanut fields in Georgia from the blitzkrieg, the way I hear it. Whoop-de-do.”
“You realize that you and I have the same publisher, Blair? And that I can end your career with a phone call?”
“Don’t trouble yourself, I’m ending it myself.”
Butcher Byrne turned around. Jane Dennison and his son Doug were standing in the door behind him, watching the show. “Douglas, bring me my shotgun,” Butcher said.
“Yes, sir,” Doug replied. He vanished.
“You’d better leave,” Slum said. “He’ll shoot you, Sandy. He will. And call you a trespasser.”
Sandy turned. “I’ll leave, if you’ll come with me.”
Slum shook his head. “I can’t,” he muttered, averting his eyes. “It wouldn’t help. Butcher would just call the cops, and they’d drag me back, maybe shut me up in that mental place again. I’m incompetent.”
“Like shit you are,” Sandy said. “All right, then. Stay. But I’m going to get a lawyer, Slum. We’re going to get you free of this, I promise.”
“Hire all the lawyers you want, Mister Blair,” said Butcher Byrne. “I assure you that I can afford to hire better ones. You won’t take my son from me again.” Douglas reentered the room carrying a double-barreled shotgun. Butcher accepted it from him wordlessly, cracked it to check that it was loaded, then closed it up again and pointed it at Sandy. “Your choice, Blair. You begin walking right now, or I pull the trigger.”
The mouth of the shotgun, only a few feet away, loomed vastly large. Sandy trembled. Butcher looked deadly earnest. But something inside him, some rage, some stubbornness, some wild courage, would not permit Sandy to back down. He fell back on the only defense he had ever really perfected: words. “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent,” he said with an insolence he did not really feel. “You shoot me and you’re in deep shit, asshole.”
Butcher sighted along the barrel very carefully, squinting, and for an instant Sandy thought it was all over. And then, behind him, Slum shouted: “NO!” and something came whizzing over Sandy’s shoulder—a book, thrown hard. Butcher ducked, but too slowly. The book caught him square across the temple, staggering him. The shotgun came down, and he raised a hand to his forehead, blinking. Then he smiled. “Not bad, Jefferson,” he said. “Maybe I’ll make a man of you yet.”
Slum was on his feet, glaring from wild eyes, teeth bared. “I’ll kill you, you fucker, you FUCKER!” he screamed. He lunged toward his father.
But Sandy got in the way, and grabbed him. “No, don’t.”
“Let me go,” Slum said, struggling. “He would have shot you. He would have.”
“Maybe,” said Sandy, wrenching Slum backward and planting himself firmly in the way. “But if you kill him you become what he is. That’s what he wants. That’s what he wanted all along—to make you over in his image. You don’t need that. You’re better than him. You’re the one who had the guts to say no, more guts than any of your brothers ever had. Don’t throw it away. If you hit him, he wins.”
Slum slumped back against the wall, his rage ebbing until he simply looked confused. “I don’t know,” he muttered. He put a hand to his face. “I just don’t know.”
Jane Dennison came across the room with brisk strides, carrying a medical bag of some sort. “See what you’ve done,” she said coldly to Sandy. “I told you this would trigger an episode.” She took Slum gently by the hand. “It’s time for your medicine, Jeff.”
Slum wrenched his arm free and backed away from her. “I don’t need no medicine.” He held up his hands as if to ward her off. “Stay away.” But Dennison ignored him. Methodically, she extracted a hypodermic from her bag, loaded it. “No!” Slum insisted, more loudly. Dennison took his arm, swabbed it with alcohol. He cringed but did not fight.
“This is just something to calm you down, Jeff,” the nurse said, but when the needle neared his vein, Slum screamed. Sandy felt a sick horror, and moved toward them, but before he could interfere Butcher caught him from behind. Slum screamed and cried. He was still screaming as Butcher and Doug together pulled Sandy from the room.
Outside, the door closed behind them. Joseph William Byrne smirked. “He would never have touched me, Blair. I didn’t need your little sermon. Jefferson is a coward. He’s always been a coward, since he was a little boy. Sometimes I don’t think he’s mine at all. But he bears my name, and he won’t disgrace it any more than he has.”
“Disgrace?” Sandy said shrilly. He was so angry he thought he might choke, but there were tears in his eyes as well. He fought desperately to hold them back, unwilling to give Butcher the satisfaction of seeing him cry. “What kind of miserable excuse for a human being are you? He’s your son! You ought to be proud of him!”
“Proud of what? Cowardice? He threw away every advantage I gave him, and when his country called him, he ran. His mother died of the shame. There’s not an ounce of courage in him.”
“Like hell,” Sandy said. “You think it took guts to go to ’Nam? Hell, it was easy. Just go along, do what’s expected of you, follow orders. It takes a hell of a lot more courage to do what Slum did—to stand up alone, to follow his own conscience. More courage and more brains and more fucking morality. He made the hard choice, gave up his family and friends and country for something bigger than any of them. You think that was easy? Especially for him, for a goddamned Byrne? What did you want?”
“I wanted him to be a man, to do his duty.”
“A man?” Sandy said savagely. “He is a man, you asshole. A man who did his own thinking and stood up for what he believed. All you wanted was a martinet. If he’d gone to ’Nam and napalmed a few villages, brought back a few gook ears, you’d have thought that was terrific, even if he only went because he was scared of you. And maybe he would have died. That would have been better, right? Then you could have had two black-bordered portraits downstairs instead of just one.”
The vein in Butcher’s forehead was going wild again. “My son Robert gave his life for this country, and I won’t have his memory blasphemed by your foul mouth, Blair.”
“Shit!” Sandy said. The tears had come at last, and he was screaming. “It’s Slum who’s the hero, not your precious Robert! It don’t take no courage to kill, you bloody fucker. A machine can take orders, and all it takes to stand in front of a bullet and die is a mess of bad luck. You stupid evil man, you—”
The shotgun wa
s still in Butcher’s hands, and the man’s face had turned a deep stormcloud purple. The gun came up so fast that Sandy never saw it move. The stock caught him hard across the face, snapping his head around, sending him stumbling. He went down and sat up spitting blood. He’d bitten his tongue, and the whole left side of his face tingled from the blow. Butcher was standing over him, the shotgun pointed down. “One more word and you’re dead meat.”
“Is that a line from one of your shit-ass books?” Sandy spat.
That was when Doug took a hand. He grabbed his father by the shoulder and gently drew him back. “No, Dad,” was all he said, but it seemed to be enough. Butcher stared at Sandy with a terrible loathing for a long minute, then spun and stalked off down the hall.
Doug helped Sandy to his feet. “You better get out of here, Mister,” he said. “Butcher doesn’t cool down, he just gets madder and madder. He didn’t like what you said about Bobby.”
“I noticed,” Sandy said ruefully. He touched the side of his face. It was already tender. He was going to have an awful bruise, and was probably lucky not to have lost any teeth. “I’m going,” he said. Doug walked him to the door.
But out on the porch, Sandy turned to face the youngest Byrne boy one more time. He looked so much like Slum had. “You got to understand,” he said with sudden urgency. “Slum’s a good man. Your father’s wrong. There was an awful lot of love in Slum. And he was brave. That’s the important thing. Yeah, he was uncertain, insecure, scared of a lot of stuff. Your father especially. But he always faced those fears, and that’s what courage really amounts to. Being scared and going on anyhow. Do you understand that? Do you understand why Slum went to Canada? Do you?”
Douglas MacArthur Byrne leaned back against one of the pillars and studied Sandy out of cool, clear eyes, full of all the certainty of adolescence. He looked so achingly familiar, and yet so terribly different. Finally he crossed his arms. “Guys like you make me mad,” he said in a flat alien voice. “It was on account of guys like you that we lost in ’Nam, and got kicked around by piss-ant Iranians. I know why Jeffy went to Canada all right. Jeffy went to Canada ’cause Jeffy is a wimp.”