Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

And as if they hadn’t obeyed by their own will and hadn’t pulled the trigger with intent.

It was just man’s fate to do evil, that was his father’s repeated claim. It was as natural as the sunrise. No other explanations need be given, no justifications need be offered, and no excuses need be made.

“If he’s still shooting the dawn,” Donnally said, “then I guess I don’t need to check the sign-in sheet.”

His mother cast him a fond and forgiving smile. “I think this was purely an economic decision,” she said. “Not an existential one.”

“Why? Did he put his own money into it?”

“Actually, he did. He even reduced costs by shooting some of the jungle scenes in Mexico instead of doing them all in Southeast Asia.”

“Why? The Pentagon’s movie budget got cut, so he found a way to get the Mexican taxpayer to foot the bill?”

Before she could answer, a light knock on the door drew their attention to Julia, his mother’s nurse and companion, entering with a tray of tea and medications. Donnally rose as she set it down and then gave her a hug.

“I didn’t bother asking her,” Donnally said, gesturing toward his mother, “because she won’t tell me the truth. So I’ll ask-”

“The doctor said that nothing has changed,” his mother said, then she looked up at Julia. “Isn’t that right?”

Donnally held his palm down toward his mother, but kept his eyes fixed on Julia. “Well?”

“I better seek refuge in my constitutional right to remain silent,” Julia said.

“Then I’ve got my answer.”

“S he’s been dreaming a lot about your brother,” Julia told Donnally as they stood next to his rental car in the driveway.

“Probably because Donnie’s birthday is coming up.”

Donnally looked up at his mother’s window. He watched the breeze ruffle the sheer curtains next to the bed where she lay asleep.

“I wonder how she sees Donnie in her mind,” Donnally said. “As twenty years old or as the fifty-seven he’d be now?”

Donnally felt a wave of sadness, imagining that his mother saw not how Donnie really would have looked, but as his father had looked at that age.

“Why don’t you ask her?” Julia asked.

“Because we’d get lost in a circular conversation since she’s not willing to admit to herself that if my father hadn’t sold his soul to the Pentagon, Donnie would still be alive.”

“You’re wrong. She admitted that years ago. She’s just unwilling to make the choice you want her to make between your brother and your father.”

Julia paused, then frowned and lowered her gaze.

“No,” she finally said, looking back up at him. “that’s not really it. I think I’ve been framing it wrong. The choice you want her to make is between you and your father, between how you see the world and how he does, how you imagine the past and how he does.”

“There’s no choice. The world is the way it is and the past was the way it was.”

Neither of them had to say what that past was, for it lived in the present like an unhealed wound: advertising genius Captain Donald Harlan conducting a Saigon briefing, selling the war to the press, and to his elder son.

Donnie had been so moved by his father’s story of Buddhist monks murdered by the North Vietnamese that he had enlisted in the marines, only to learn the truth eight months later when he talked to villagers near the DMZ: The monks had been executed by U.S. Korean allies.

He went AWOL and traveled to Saigon to confront his father, who claimed to have been deceived by the South Vietnamese military. Donnie returned to his unit and was killed in what the Silver Star commendation described as “a heroic battle in which he had engaged the enemy on all sides.”

It wasn’t until Donnally read the Pentagon Papers as part of a high school civics class that he discovered that Captain Donald Harlan had himself composed the lie, justifying it as having been told in the service of a greater good. He also learned that “engaging the enemy on all sides” meant in army-speak that his brother had been ambushed, led into a trap by those he believed he was fighting for.

Coming home from school that day, staggered by betrayal and quavering with rage, Donnally had resolved to make his father the model for everything he wouldn’t be.

The next day he moved out the house and got a job.

On his eighteenth birthday he went to court and switched his first name for his last.

And on the day he graduated from UCLA, he drove north and swore his oath as a San Francisco police officer.

Donnally looked past Julia in the direction of the distant mountains, imagining his father’s satisfaction as he wrapped up the shoot.

“My father still deludes himself that his fictions can be truer than the truth, when they’re just lies he tells himself.” He reached into his pocket for his car keys. “He’ll never change.”

J ust after dark, Donnally parked a battered Caprice station wagon along the tree-lined southern edge of Golden Gate Park. He shrugged a surplus navy peacoat over his work shirt and put on a tattered Oakland A’s cap to give him the appearance of a man just a couple of missed paychecks into homelessness.

He slumped his shoulders in feigned defeat as he walked across the amber-lit street and passed by a collection of homeless men and lurking parolees. He entered the corner liquor store and bought two pints of E amp;J Brandy as bribes to make friends in the park with people who might know Charles Brown, and slid them into his coat pockets.

Two tattooed skinheads bracketed Donnally as he stepped back onto the shadowed sidewalk, as though they were cowboys cutting a cow out of a herd for branding. The shorter of the men kept his hand inside his unzipped jacket. The taller gripped Donnally by the left elbow and leaned into him, urging him down the sidewalk.

“Stay cool, man,” the short one said, without looking up. “It’ll be over in a minute and you can walk away.”

Donnally slumped even lower as they pushed him into a driveway leading toward the closed underground garage of a two-story Victorian.

“Just don’t hurt me.” Donnally said, as they descended. “I got kids.”

Donnally stopped halfway down and looked at the taller of the robbers, then tilted his head toward his front right pocket.

“Take the wallet, man. It’s everything I got.”

The two skinheads glanced backward. Donnally followed their eyes. A homeless sixty-year-old Asian man was watching them from behind an overstuffed grocery cart parked on the sidewalk across the street.

The shorter man pulled a Buck knife from his jacket and pressed it against Donnally’s side while the taller reached into Donnally’s front pocket and worked the wallet out. He thumbed through the two hundred dollars, then smiled at his partner as he took out the cash.

He turned back to Donnally. “Where’s your ID?”

“Hidden in the park. I got warrants. I don’t want to make it easy for the cops.”

“For what?”

Donnally shrugged.

The shorter skinhead snapped the Buck knife closed, slid it into his back pocket.

“No hard feelings, man. Just business.”

“I know,” Donnally said, as the skinheads strolled back up the driveway. “Dog eat dog.”

As the two turned the corner back onto the sidewalk, Donnally heard the taller one laugh and say, “That asshole sure ain’t gonna call the cops. Last thing he wants is to share a cell with us.”

Donnally reached into his sock, pulled out his cell phone, and called his old partner at SFPD. He described the two and said, “Swing by and see if you can ID the guys and get some photos, but don’t arrest them for a couple of days. I’m working on something in Golden Gate Park and don’t want to get burned. I’ll explain everything later.”