Harlan's Race

tight — they never turned him in, and he never got caught. He started having questions about the war after he started springing POWs. After they gave him the yahoo medal. I always thought —■”
    “What medal?” Vince interrupted.
    “Navy Cross.”
    Harry glanced through the bedroom door at Chino’s sprawled form on the bed.
    “Well,” he said, “I always had a feeling that somebody he loved was killed. When I met him after the war, he’d just gotten out of the VA hospital, and he was addicted to morphine from the pain, and half nuts about something. And he resigned his commission. So they never got to throw him out.”
    Chino’s mystery seemed to hold a key to LEV.’s mystery. Now and then, little threats kept us on edge. Strange clicks in the telephone line. A boat hovering on the bay nearby. On duty, Chino often spent nights outdoors, and Striper often slept with him, like she knew what her job was. One night, Chino was alerted by the cat’s sudden stare. Then he heard a faint early-warning of the tin cans from the cove. Something had tripped the wire in the water.
    Chino was over there in an instant, like a supersonic shadow — and saw nothing.
    Meanwhile, word got around The Pines and The Grove that Steve Goodnight and Harlan Brown had hooked up with military animals — the kind that had blood clear to their elbows. George Rayburn, who belonged to the pacifist wing of the gay activists, was hardly speaking to me these days.
    “Girlfriend, I’d let myself be machine-gunned to goddam confetti before I’d ever hurt another human being,” George told me on the boardwalk one day.
    George had been a friend of Billy’s, and Billy’s dad — another link to the past.
    As I sat at the typewriter trying to capture thoughts, my post-hippie, radical-chic lover was captured by the military mind.
    At the Hotel, games kept us sharp, and vented our tensions. Our volleyball and touch football was so noisy that we drove bathers off our beach. Our daily runs were races. Some days, we went out in the boat to see who could dig the most clams. Even our cookouts resolved into who could fillet fish faster. We played at breaking patterns, changing booby traps around.
    As Harry and Chino got to know Vince, and he pestered them with questions, their attitude softened. But they took a sadistic joy in keeping him on edge — checking on his self-control and his willingness to learn. Vince was smart enough to know he was being tested. One afternoon, on the front deck, I found the two of them hooting at him. Vince was wearing a G-string and cocoa butter, and trying to leam how to throw knives. The vets were wearing Speedos, sunglasses and cheap tan oil, and they were ragging Vince about the effects of weed on his hand-eye coordination.
    “Harlan,” Chino said cheerfully, past the little cigar he was smoking, “we are fucking with your pinko pot-head boyfriend’s mind.”
    For a target, they had hauled a big driftwood plank up from the beach, leaned it against the house, and drew a human silhouette on it. I perched on the rail with a Coke, and watched as... WHACK!... Harry put his combat knife between the shoulder blades. The board vibrated with a deep thunnnngggg. Then WHACK!... Chino sank his knife right beside Harry’s.
    Then ... whunk ... Vince’s throw with Harry’s knife bounced off the board and clanged to the deck.
    “Whatsa matter, Vincie Wincie?” Harry wanted to know. “Catch your high heel?”
    Vince tightened his jaw. His next throw stuck on the very edge of the board.
    Steve, Angel, Bark and I started throwing too. I even threw my stick. Angel got surprisingly good. We graduated to the gamut of sharp things from the kitchen drawers. Low-score man had to do the dishes. When Vince finally sank one into the “heart” for the first time, Harry said, “Hoo-ah! We’ll make a sow’s ear out of you yet.”
    As days passed, Vince learned to take down and clean the vets’ handguns. Party-line liberalism was out the window.
    My lover’s one counterculture obsession was to grow his own pot on the Beach. Those were the days before marijuana became a U.S. agribusiness, when it was every druggie’s dream to plant just a few good imported seeds. By pinching and fertilizing, you were sure to get one superplant that would send you straight to whatever heaven you believed in. Vince started some seeds in a big flower pot hidden in the brush, where he hoped the FIPD and the National Seashore rangers