Free Time to Hunt by Stephen Hunter

down.
    “Cool wheels,” said Donny, hopping in.
    “I picked it up a little while ago in England,” he said. “I got burned out on peace shit. I took a little sabbatical,went to London, spent some time in Oxford. The Ruskin School of Drawing. Bought this baby.”
    “You must be loaded.”
    “Oh, I think there’s money in the family. Not my father; he doesn’t make a penny. He’s in State, planning some tiny part of the war, the economic infrastructure of the province of Quang Tri. What does your dad do?” Trig asked.
    “My dad was a rancher. He worked like hell and never made a penny. He died poor.”
    “But he died clean. In our family, we don’t work. The money works. We play. Working for something you believe in, that’s the best. That’s the maximum charge. And if you can have a good time at it, man, that’s
really
cool.”
    Donny said nothing. But a darkness settled on him: he was here as a Judas, wasn’t he? He’d sell Trig out for thirty pieces of silver, or rather three stripes and no trip back to the Land of Bad Things. He looked over at Trig. The wind was blowing the slightly older man’s hair back lushly, like a cape streaming behind a horseman. Trig wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and had one of those high, beautiful foreheads. He looked like a young god on a good day.
    This guy was Weather Underground? This guy would bomb things, blow up people, that sort of stuff? It didn’t seem possible. By no reach of his imagination could he see Trig as conspiratorial. He was too much at the center of things; the world had given itself to him too easily and too eagerly.
    “Could you kill anyone?” Donny asked.
    Trig laughed, showing white teeth.
    “What a question! Wow, I’ve never been asked that one!”
    “I killed seven men,” Donny said.
    “Well, if you hadn’t have killed them, would they have killed you?”
    “They were
trying
to!”
    “So, there you have it. You made your decision. Butno, no, I couldn’t. I just can’t see it. For me, too much would die. I’d be better off dead myself than having killed anything. That’s just what I believe. I’ve believed it ever since I looked in a house in Stanleyville and saw twenty-five kids cut to pieces. I can’t even remember if it’s because they were rebels or government. They probably didn’t know. Right then: no more killing. Stop the killing. Just like the man says, all we are saying is give peace a chance.”
    “Well, it’s hard to give it a chance when a guy is whacking away at you with an AK-47.”
    Trig laughed.
    “You have me there, partner,” he said merrily.
    But then he said, “Sure, anybody gets that kind of slack. But you wouldn’t have shot into that ditch in My Lai like those other guys did. You would have walked away. Hot blood, cold blood. Hell, you’re a cowboy. You were trained to shoot in self-defense. You shot
morally.”
    Donny didn’t know what to say. He just stared ahead glumly until in the falling light they sped through downtown, past the big government buildings still shiny in the fading sun, along the park-lined river and at last reached West Potomac Park, just beyond Jefferson’s classy monument.
    Welcome to the May Tribe.
    On one side of the street, eight or nine cop cars were parked, and DC cops in riot gear watched in sullen knots. Across the street, equally sullen, knots of hippie kids in jeans and oversized fatigue coats and long flowing hair watched back. It was a stare-down; nobody was winning.
    Trig’s presence registered immediately and the kids parted, suddenly grinning, and Trig drove the Triumph through them and down an asphalt road that led toward the river, some playing fields, some trees. But it was more like Sherwood Forest than any college campus. The meadows streamed with kids in tents, kids at campfires, kids stoned, playing Frisbee, singing, smoking, eating,necking, bathing topless in the river. Port-a-pots had been put up everywhere, bright blue and smelly.
    “It’s the gathering of