Chapter 2

As soon as I got in I went over to the television and turned it on. The Dallas game would be starting soon. My stock with Samantha had gone up appreciably when she found out that I had a share in season tickets to the Redskins games. Unfortunately I’d lost the toss to my brother. He and his latest honey were at the game. Twenty-five years ago when my father first got them, you couldn’t give away Redskins tickets. Now the waiting list for them is measured in eons. Holding a pair of them can boost your social standing tremendously. They exempt you from the required years of breeding and wads of money. At least from September to January they do.

I went into the kitchen as they announced the one-hundred-and-forty-something consecutive sellout of the stadium. Fifty-five thousand screaming fanatics created such an adrenaline contact high that playing at home was worth damn near a touchdown to the Redskins. I put some leftover pizza in the microwave and opened an Anchor Steam beer. As I watched the camera pan around the stadium at the fifty-five thousand cheering faces, I was jolted by the image of a skull in every seat. That’s how many names were on that wall: a sellout at RFK. What a waste. We don’t kill people anymore, we “waste” them. Just ask any punk on the street.

When the pizza was hot I took it and my beer to the living room and tried to get lost in the game. The Redskins were eating up the yards and the clock. The ball was on the three yard line and everyone in Washington knew it was going to Rogers behind the Hogs. Knowing it and stopping it are worlds apart. Rogers took the ball and headed towards Grimm and Jacoby. Between them appeared a hole a yard wide. I leaned forward ready to cheer. Suddenly the picture disappeared. SPECIAL NEWS REPORT flashed on the screen. I was staring at the face of a local anchorman.

“We interrupt this broadcast of the Redskins-Cowboys football game to bring you this emergency report from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” He touched the receiver in his ear. “Dick, are you ready? Okay, go with it.”

The next picture was of a reporter standing on the grassy knoll opposite the wall. He was repeatedly running his hands through his hair and there was a stain on his shirt the camera couldn’t avoid.

“Minutes ago, a bomb, apparently hidden in a picnic basket, exploded here at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The police have cordoned off the area and are holding everyone in the immediate area for questioning.” The howl of an ambulance rose above his voice. Cries and wails could be heard over that. He went on. “We’re going to try to get closer to the wall if we can. What you hear are the survivors.” He began to walk down the path we had taken towards the wall. The minicam eye followed him. A police officer held up a hand and halted them. After a brief conversation, the reporter turned back. “We’re not being allowed any closer. We’re going to try to pan the scene from here.”

I stared at the set, fascinated and horrified. Rubbernecking at a crash site. You missed me. You missed me. There but for the grace of God, go I. To feel the chill and still live. The camera zoomed in. The wall was pitted and scarred. Many of the names had been obliterated by the shrapnel. Whole panels were cracked in jagged lines. As the camera’s merciless eye crossed the wall closer to the ground, you could see stains on the wall, pools in the dirt and then the slowly spinning wheel of an upended wheelchair. Paramedics with stretchers were crisscrossing the screen. Each body they carried was sheeted head to foot.

The camera moved back to the reporter’s face. “The death toll at present is nineteen. Five others have been sent to Georgetown’s Shock Trauma Center. That’s all we know at this time. We will have updates whenever new developments emerge. We return you now to our regularly scheduled program.”

I finally took a deep breath, got up out of my squat and went back to the phone. I called Arnie. The phone rang four times before he picked it up.

“Yo.”

“Arnie, did you hear about the wall?”

“No. What?”

“A bomb went off just after we left. It tore the place up. Nineteen dead, five more critical.”

“Who did it?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“What about the kid and his mother?”

“No names have been released. They might not have been there either.”

“Okay. Thanks for calling.”

I tried Samantha. She wasn’t answering her phone. Damn.

I finished eating and sat staring at the set. I had achieved the rare anti-Zen state of being both empty-headed and muddled. The countdown of the final seconds and the roar in the background brought me around. The Redskins had won and the hated Cowboys would have to skulk back to Dallas and lick their wounds. I couldn’t have cared less.

Promptly at seven the news came on. Sitting next to the anchorman was a D.C. police officer introduced as Lieutenant Calvin Simmons. After the introduction and an open-ended question, Simmons began to flesh out the earlier report.

“The device was a large explosive charge wrapped in a casing of metal balls. It seems to be homemade, but the design is similar to the ‘Bouncing Betty’ mines that were used by U.S. forces in Vietnam. The size of the charge and its configuration allowed for a uniform saturation across the entire face of the wall. The choice of explosive, its placement and the timing of the detonation indicate that the intention was clearly to maim and kill those visiting the memorial, not to damage the structure itself. We believe the bomb was detonated by remote control, and are requesting that all photographs taken by people at the memorial today be brought to us for enhancement. Hopefully, someone will show up in the background either with the picnic basket or observing the wall from the hillside facing it.”

The anchorman cut in. “Has anyone claimed credit for the bombing?”

“No, not yet. Because the site of the attack is federal property we are coordinating our efforts with the FBI. The last two attacks on federal property in the city were both bombings of the Capitol. In 1971, the Weathermen claimed responsibility for a bombing in protest of the strategic bombing of Laos. In 1983 a group calling itself the Armed Resistance Unit set off a bomb to protest our involvement in Lebanon and Grenada. However, in neither of those attacks was anyone killed. This kind of attack, launched without warning, signals a new level of terrorist activity in the city.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Simmons. We are switching now to our remote cameras at the Shock Trauma Unit. Come in, Dick.”

The reporter I’d seen earlier came back on. He didn’t look so hot.

“Uh, yes. We don’t have much on the five people still in critical condition. Three are still in surgery. However, next of kin of the other victims have been reached and we can release those names now.”

A roster of names began to roll across the screen. Two thirds of the way down the names of James Tucker Calhoun, age eight, and Melissa Anne Calhoun, twenty-seven, of Knoxville, Tennessee, rolled by. Rest in peace.

The news switched back to the studio and became a background drone and irritation. I turned it off and tried Samantha’s number. Again no answer. In the kitchen I poured a couple of inches of John Powers Irish whiskey and took my current reading, Allen Wheelis’s The Illusionless Man, to my easy chair.

Try as I might I couldn’t forget James Tucker Calhoun’s sudden end. Unbidden, his image would flash onto my inner eye. First positive, then negative, then gone. I ached around the edge of his absence, like the pain from a phantom limb. Not a great pain. We had only passed a few minutes together, but it was enough to lift him from the nameless, faceless crowd into my memory. I stared at the ceiling and yearned for Arnie’s armor. Instead, I settled for John Powers’s undercoat and glaze.