Harlan's Race

drew my mind back to the present.
    The dead dolphin’s shadow was longer. A cloud of flies hung around it.
    By the gunwhale, my wavering reflection looked back from the water. A mature man of 55 was there — an old albatross — gun-metal hair receding a bit, crows-feet and mouth-lines deeper. The eyes were more human, less sure of the answers, more courageous about questions. Maturity had to be a desirable thing, if it helped me see life in the face of death, and a poem in the mask of writ:
    Because we have set our hearts as our own before heaven and earth,
    Behold, we stand strong before strangers, the terrible of the nations, who war upon us:
    And they will break their swords on the beauty of our wisdom,
    And they will fail to defile our brightness ...
    Some old questions still ate at my spirit.
    The LAPD and the California attorney general and our family had all investigated Chris Shelbourne. Law-enforcement authorities were damn well aware that violence today was more likely to come from right-wing, not left-wing, groups. But the law failed to get Chris’ wife to admit she knew of his secret life. Eventually the authorities gave up an active investigation. After all, the system wasn’t really motivated to stem the violence directed at gays and lesbians.
    It was our old barn owl, Russell, patient and silent, hunting mice in the dark, who finally located an ex-member of Joshua Force. The man had done time for rightist violence. He was tired of the whole thing, willing to talk provided it was off the record.
    Yeah, he said, Richard was the old hand who took the lost kid under his wing. He met Chris in the ’60s while being staged in and out of Vietnam, from a French base. Chris was working in Paris — ready to explode with guilt, belief and hunger for virile action. In 1970, after they both got back to California, Mech recruited Chris into a tiny nucleus of militants who were deeply disgusted with hippies, dope, uppity women’s libbers, polymorphous perverts and the general fall from grace of “their” America.
    Mech trained Chris himself, said our inf ormant. Chris was eager to prove himself—took to it like a duck takes to water. The kid worshipped the ground Mech walked on. Relationship? Our informant didn’t think so. Mech was a hard-ass on moral purity. Chris always seemed just as hard. The Force chaplain learned that Chris knew Harlan Brown when. So Chris was, you know, under a lot of pressure to show the guys he was okay. When the Billy Sive scandal boiled up, it was the perfect chance for a hit that would make a moral statement. The two were the perfect sniper team.
    The snafus started with a Canadian trial, he told us. They’d counted on Mech being extradited, getting a very light sentence in an American prison. Later, they’d withdrawn support from Chris’ ongoing harassment of me, considering that he’d gotten a bit mental and “tetched by the Lord”. It wasn’t their MO to put that much effort into harassing one person. Wham and scram was their style, like they’d done with Billy. Joshua Force had other fish to fry. Like a planned campaign of escalating violence against abortion clinics. So Chris had funded Operation LEV. with great difficulty and tenacity, hitting me between AP assignments. The informant was surprised to learn that Chris was a homosexual. Chris did a good job of fooling everybody in the Force, he said. The Joshua men believed they could smell a pansy a mile away.
    We learned nothing from Richard Mech, who was released from Canadian prison in 1988. After Mech returned to the U.S., he dropped out of sight. I didn’t want to know why.
    The years had passed so fast.
    In late 1981, my book sprinted onto the bestseller lists. Old controversies exploded again. I seized the opening to get the rest of Steve’s work published too.
    One major studio did approach me about film rights. I listened to their jitters about the love scenes. Dammit, I wanted Billy and me to kiss on the silver screen. But however liberal Hollywood may have gotten, there was still one commandment. Thou mayest portray homo misfits and drag queens. But thou shalt not film two butch males in the throes of passion. Valhalla was hot to do it, and I’d have trusted them. But I couldn’t hack the close personal involvement. Like hearing the director say, “Hey, in the closeup here let’s have more blood on his head.”
    As the ’80s moved on, anti-gay sentiment grew stronger. The AAU refused to give