No one was sure; all the Dhonts looked back and forth at each other. “Bunch of people have participated in the program,” Dick finally said.
“When did the program start?” Clyde said.
“Lot of questions,” Mr. Dhont grunted.
“Desiree’s going to ask me all this when I tell her about Princess,” Clyde explained, “so we might as well get it over with.”
Dan Dhont, Jr., finished chewing something big and said, “The first time I heard about it was a month ago.”
“Middle or late August?” Clyde said.
“Yup,” Dan, Jr., said.
That put an end to the conversation; Dan had as much as admitted that the mysterious horse program had something to do with Saddam Hussein, and Saddam was a forbidden subject at that table ever since Desiree had been called up.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The secure phone in the closet began to ring just after lunch one Saturday afternoon. Betsy’s first thought was that it must be Kevin calling from the road to give her an update. He’d left a message yesterday morning announcing that he was bailing out of his life: he’d resigned from his job with the Rainmaker, packed some stuff into his Camry, and was about to hit the road, westbound. He wasn’t going to stop until he reached Nampa, or perhaps even the West Coast. The funny thing was that he didn’t sound drunk at all. He sounded more sober than he had in months.
But it was irrational for her to think that Kevin could reach her on the secure phone. Only a few people seemed to have access to that. She picked it up and heard the familiar voice of Edward Seamus Hennessey: “Nice afternoon—the temperature’s not more than a hundred, the humidity’s not more than ninety-five percent, the ozone count is setting records. Meet you at Iwo Jima in fifteen minutes.”
It was a five-minute walk for Betsy to the Iwo Jima memorial. During the summer she went there on occasional Tuesday evenings to watch the Marine Corps color guard do their precision drill—she especially liked the “silent drill” in which, for a full twenty minutes, the beautifully schooled Marines performed with better than clockwork precision while the sunset turned the buildings along the Mall and the Capitol into infinite shades of pink and orange.
Today was not a day to be out at the monument. As Hennessey had pointed out, the weather was typically appalling. But Betsy had been indoors since yesterday afternoon, doing laundry and cleaning house, and she needed to get out even if the day was miserable. She walked around the base of the statue and read the names of all the battles the Marines had fought. She stopped at the south end of the statue, looked up the flagpole, and saw the hands reaching to plant it in the forbidding soil of Mount Suribachi.
At times like this, or when she walked the Vietnam Wall searching for the name of her cousin who had died there, or went to the Lincoln and read the walls, she loved her country. And when she loved her country, she could actually wax indignant about what she’d been going through. She should have felt that way all the time, of course, but nowadays it took a trip to a major national monument to get her into the right perspective.
She knew that to be seen having a private tête-à-tête with Hennessey was a career-ender, but that hardly mattered at this point. It was time to get out of D.C. Time to bail, just as Kevin had bailed.
She didn’t know what she would do in Nampa. But as she read the names of the battles and thought of the young people who had died, sometimes wastefully, for the U.S., she began to understand. Wars were more than battles between declared enemies; they went on at all levels at all times, and sometimes the innocent got killed. She had given her best, she had taken it in the neck, but she was still alive, and there was a whole world outside the beltway where her name had not yet been sullied and where her career prospects ought to be fine. She turned to look through the ozone and pollen and humidity across the Potomac, across the Roosevelt Bridge, and saw the different shades of gray on Lincoln, Washington, and the Dome, the beautiful Dome, and then on to her right at the rolling waves of white headstones at Arlington. The thought that others may have died in these wars, some needlessly and stupidly, didn’t make her feel justified—merely not alone.
She kept walking around the Iwo Jima reading the battles, and she ran into Hennessey, who did not see her.
“Nice day,” Betsy said, aiming for a certain sense of irony.
Hennessey didn’t answer. He was smoking a cigarette, looking nowhere in particular, and then he said, “My brother’s up here.” He motioned at a name. “He would have ended up drunk and in jail if he hadn’t gone into the Marines and become a national hero. My family drinks too much. Always has. But we do interesting things, too. I’ll never get my name carved in stone, of course.”