CHAPTER TWO
Denton, North Carolina
2017 CE
Crack, crack, crack!
The magazine emptied and the slide locked back as the X-ring of Benjamin Schröder’s fifty-yard pistol target disintegrated. There was one flyer in the 8-ring, and he scowled at it as he ejected the empty magazine and laid the pistol on the bench in front of him. The North Carolina summer afternoon was hot, but the shooting positions were covered by a light roof to keep the direct sunlight at bay. He didn’t like to think what his ears would have felt like under that cover if he’d been stupid enough to come to the range without ear protection, but he was incredibly grateful for the shade.
“My, my, my!” His younger brother’s murmured comment was perfectly clear over the electronic shooting muffs’ microphones. “I think Dad would have had a thing or two to say to you about that, big brother.”
Benjamin transferred his scowl from the target to his brother, and to the short, compact fellow standing behind him.
“I believe my running score is still higher than yours,” he observed.
“Oh, I can’t believe you!” David Schröder laughed out loud. “Of course it’s higher! I haven’t fired this round yet.”
“And there’s no reason to believe you won’t have a round go astray,” Benjamin pointed out.
“And when was the last time that happened, exactly?” David asked, stepping up to the shooting position and closing the cylinder on his S&W 686.
“Shooting two-handed, with those wimpy little .38s instead of mags, and thumb-cocking between every round, you mean?” Benjamin inquired just a bit nastily. “And with a six-inch barrel, I might add!”
“You are in a pissy mood today, aren’t you?” David inquired genially, and proceeded to squeeze off six rounds, rapid fire, double-action…and put all six of them into the X-ring of his target, so close together they made one large, five-petaled hole. He snapped six more rounds into the cylinder from a speed loader, then proceeded to make the hole perhaps a half-inch wider.
“Goodness!” he observed. “I seem to have inched in front somehow. How do you suppose that happened?”
“‘When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom,’” Benjamin replied. “And, for that matter, ‘Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.’ I wouldn’t want to say anything of the sort is headed your way, but this…unmannerly gloating ill becomes you.”
“Nonsense,” Stephen O’Shane-Schröder replied, reaching out and cuffing the back of David’s head gently. “Given how often he does it, he’s obviously of the opinion that it becomes him very well, indeed.”
Benjamin chuckled as he began thumbing fresh rounds into his H&K USP’s magazine. He really preferred the .45 ACP version, which was what he usually took to the range, but today he was shooting the .40 S&W. He would have liked to blame that single errant round on the change in pistols, but he knew better.
“Seriously, Ben,” David said as he cleared the brass from his revolver’s cylinder and set it down, the cylinder swung out for safety’s sake, and began refilling his speed loaders. “Something’s been eating on you all day. I’d love to beat you fair and square—Lord knows we’re both insufferable enough when we get to take home the bragging rights!—but I’ve got a feeling the big reason you invited Steve and me out here this afternoon was that you really, really needed to put some holes in a piece of paper. I remember that’s how Dad used to work out frustration, too.”
“Yes, it was,” Benjamin agreed with a sad smile. Their father had been in the South Tower on 9/11. “‘Concentration on something that requires minimal thought and maximum focus is always a good way to let go of things that won’t stop eating on your brain,’” he quoted.
“Yeah.” David shook his head. “God, I still miss him so much sometimes.”
“Me, too,” Stephen said. He wrapped an arm around David and hugged him for a moment. Then he turned back to Benjamin. “On the other hand, I think David has a point. Just what is it that’s ‘eating on your brain,’ Ben? And is there anything we can do to help?”
“Actually, it really could be something I could use your insight on—both of you,” Benjamin said.
“Like how?” David raised his eyebrows.
“Well, it all started in my Modern US History class last Tuesday,” Benjamin began, still snapping rounds into the magazine. “One of my students apparently took one of my comments amiss. It seems—”
“You’re shitting me, right?” David asked disbelievingly when Benjamin finished his explanation twenty minutes later. He could have gotten there sooner if not for the combination of incredulous interjections and cracks of laughter coming from his audience. “I mean, this idiot—O’Hearn—thinks you need gender-sensitivity training?”
“To be totally fair to him—which, to be honest I don’t want to be—I think he’s dead serious about my obviously Neolithic attitudes toward gender and sexuality,” Benjamin replied. “Mind you, we’ve never even discussed them, so he’s got exactly zero firsthand evidence upon which to form any opinions about them. I have, however, made myself a genuine pain in the ass as far as he’s concerned by refusing to hew to his chosen political narrative in other areas. I don’t think he knows what my political beliefs really are. In fact, he’d probably be surprised to find out that there are actually a few things he and I agree on. The problem is—”
“The problem,” David interrupted, “is that you’re Mom and Dad’s son, you have a working brain, and they left out ‘reverse’ when they installed your transmission. No wonder this jerk has really, really pissed you off, because he obviously doesn’t. Have a working brain, I mean. In fact, he sounds like an intellectually challenged, morally blinkered moron.” He considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “To put it kindly.”
“But otherwise, Ms. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?” Stephen asked him dryly, and he snorted.
“Point taken. But you and I both know how hard it is to be a respectably married gay guy and a political conservative at the same time, and idiots like this only make it a lot harder by poisoning the entire conversation. How many times has someone told us we’re traitors because we don’t see eye to eye with them politically or do think strict constructionalism is a good thing in a federal judge? Jumping all over someone who’s actually demonstrated bigotry’s one thing, but this asshole’s simply assuming it and then forcing the evidence to fit his preconceptions. People like that don’t convert anyone. In fact, they mostly confirm real bigots’ bigotry and push away people who might have been on their side!”
“Be fair,” Benjamin said. “I run into just as many people on the right who get pissed off because of my stance on gay marriage and gay rights. I guess all three of us flunk the ‘ideological purity’ litmus test. Heck, just look at where we are right this minute!” He snorted, gesturing around at the pine trees surrounding the Denton Rifle and Pistol Club’s shooting range. “How can we possibly be trusted on social issues if we’re such dangerous, right-wing, fascistic supporters of the evil gun lobby! It’s bad enough Dad raised both of us as Bambi killers, but did we have to go and get concealed-carry permits on top of everything else? Obviously O’Hearn has to assume someone so lost to all sense of decency on those issues has to be a misogynistic, homophobic, genderphobic neo-Nazi, as well.”
“Oh, he so doesn’t want to bring Nazis into this!” Stephen laughed. “Not where this family’s concerned!”
“No, he doesn’t,” Benjamin agreed. “Of course, he probably doesn’t know that. I think he’s familiar with Mom’s family—or thinks he is, anyway—because of how long the Martineaus have been associated with Castle Rock. I doubt he knows a damn thing about Dad’s side of the family.”
“Pity.” Stephen’s lips quivered. “I could just imagine the insufferable little prick melting into a spot of grease if the General had ever walked into his office!”
“Are you kidding?” Benjamin shook his head. “One look at Dad’s resume and he’d know for certain that I absolutely have to be a dangerous, right-wing, militarist reactionary, no doubt conspiring to overthrow the Constitution, suspend habeas corpus, and start shooting dissidents in the street. And that doesn’t even consider how he’d react to Horst!”
“You mean you didn’t tell him that if Dad hadn’t renounced the title you’d have been the German count instead of our beloved cousin Horst?” David rounded his eyes. “How could you possibly have passed up the opportunity to watch his eyes bug out of his head when you told him that part?”
“You two are not helping.” The severity of Benjamin’s glare was somewhat undermined by the laughter bubbling under the surface of his words.
“Sure we are!” Stephen told him. “We’re helping you vent. And just think of all the additional ammunition we’re reminding you of when you need it.”
“Including us, you know, Ben,” David said in a much more serious tone. Benjamin looked at him, one eyebrow raised, and David shrugged. “I know how you feel about waving me and Steve under other people’s noses like some kind of union card, but still . . .” He shook his head. “I know you’re still short of tenure. That means this prick really can hurt you over this, if you’re not careful. If we can help you by talking to anyone in the faculty senate or the chancellor’s office, you know we will.”
“Thanks, but no.” Benjamin cupped the back of his brother’s neck in one palm, drawing him close for a brief hug. “I’ll do his stupid gender-sensitivity training—I’ll dot every i and cross every t until he’s got everything he wants. I won’t give him a single piece of ammunition to take to the tenure committee. And then, once I’ve got tenure, I’m going to invite you and Steve to the very next faculty reception.”
“That’s evil,” David told him with a chuckle.
“Maybe. And I’ll enjoy hell out of it, but not just because of how O’Hearn and certain other of my professional colleagues—on both sides of the line—will react, and you know it. You two happen to be people I love, and I love you for who you are and what you are. I don’t want the ‘approval’ of people because the fact that I love my brother and his husband proves how enlightened and noble I am, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about people who might disapprove of me because I do. Mom and Dad taught both of us better than that, David!”
“Yeah. Yeah, they did,” David agreed with another of those bittersweet smiles.
The truth was that Major General Klaus Schröder, US Army, had faced an internal struggle when he discovered his younger son was gay. The general—born in Germany in 1941, son of Generalmajor Graf Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder—had been raised with a firm and unwavering understanding of what went into manhood. He’d also been raised by a man who was bitterly ashamed of his native country’s horrendous actions and by a mother whose blood was as blue as Klaus-Wilhelm’s own…and whose brother had seen his wife’s Jewish parents disappear into Auschwitz.
Klaus-Wilhelm’s shame had cut even deeper because as a boy growing up in post–World War One Germany, the scion of one the oldest military families in the entire country, he had actually been an early supporter of Adolf Hitler. His parents had despised the “Bavarian corporal” and his overt, rabble-rousing racism. He himself had never been a party member, yet a young, humiliated Klaus-Wilhelm had ignored the racism to concentrate on the message of German redemption. He’d decried the extremism but believed the good of the message outweighed the bad.
Until Kristallnacht, that was.
Until the stripping away of Jewish civil liberties, one by one, had come together in that night of rioting and arson and murder and the authorities—the authorities of which he, as a young German officer, had been a part—had done nothing. Until the night he’d realized to whom he’d truly given his oath as an officer. That night had brought him agonizingly face-to-face with the consequences of choice, and it was a lesson which had never left him. That night was the reason he’d been a part of the Canaris faction within the Third Reich’s intelligence services…and narrowly escaped arrest and execution after the July bomb plot. And so he had understood when Gräfin Elfriede refused to ever forgive the country of her birth which had sent two of her dearest friends into a concentration camp, never to be seen again. She’d sworn to live and die an American, and following his retirement from the Bundesnachrichtendienst, West Germany’s federal intelligence service in 1960, he’d joined her in permanent residence in the United States, where both their surviving children were already American citizens.
The searing honesty of his own father’s memories, his own father’s iron awareness of the price of moral choices, had been more than enough to teach Klaus Schröder about personal responsibility, about duty, about the truth of Edmund Burke’s ancient aphorism about the success of evil and good men who did nothing to prevent it. And then he’d compounded it by marrying a woman whose family had been involved in the civil rights struggle in the United States since well before the Civil War and who went on to become a board member of the Urban League of Greater Atlanta. So he’d felt reasonably confident of his ability to openly accept all men and women of goodwill, regardless of who or what else they might be.
And then, while David was still a high-school freshman, that confidence had been challenged. His comfortable assumption of what constituted “manhood” had run full tilt into the reality of his son’s sexuality. A thirty-plus-year career in an Army which had never accepted openly gay personnel until after his retirement hadn’t over-equipped him with the mental tools to deal with that discovery, either. But he had dealt with it. He’d dealt with it because he loved his son far too deeply to do anything else. Because David’s mother had loved her son—all of him, whoever and whatever he was—with every breath in her body. Because both of them had always believed that who a person was was far more important than what that person was. And because the way he’d found out was when David’s older brother was suspended—threatened with permanent expulsion—in his junior year of high school for a fight in which he’d beaten three senior boys bloody for the brutal harassment they’d handed out when they realized his younger son was gay.
The fact that David hadn’t already told him—not because he’d feared Klaus’s anger, but because he’d feared that his father would be disappointed in him—had reduced the tough, strong man who’d received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star with three oak clusters, six Purple Hearts, and God only knew how many other awards and citations, to tears. And that, of course, had done the same for David.
Needless to say, the possibility of Benjamin’s expulsion had vanished when General Schröder and Doctor Martineau descended upon their sons’ high school in truly Olympian wrath. And that, as far as the Schröder family’s position was concerned, had been that where the question of gay rights was concerned. By the time Stephen O’Shane came home from David’s sophomore year of college with him, General Schröder (ret) had become one of the strongest critics of the US military’s Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy. He hadn’t been out storming the barricades; instead, he’d been buttonholing senior officers—many of whom had been junior officers under his command—and policymakers behind the scenes, and he’d testified repeatedly to Congress on the issue.
And he’d worn his uniform, with every ribbon, to Stephen and David’s wedding, where he’d walked his son down the aisle to his groom.
“I really can’t believe this O’Hearn is that damned stupid,” David said now, thoughtfully.
“Oh, I can,” Stephen disagreed with a chuckle, and gave Benjamin a measuring look. “Never said a word about us to him, did you?”
“Never hid it,” Benjamin replied with a lurking smile. “And there are at least two other people on campus who know all about you two. We think of ourselves as ‘The Three Musketeers,’ although I’m pretty sure O’Hearn and his friends think of us as ‘The Three Dinosaurs.’ But, if pressed, I would have to admit I’ve been angling for something like this for a while. I just didn’t expect him to jump me before I had tenure.”
“You sandbagging bastard,” David said with a hint of admiration. “You’re setting him up.”
“No,” Benjamin said much more seriously. “I may be letting him set himself up, but if he does, it’ll be all his own doing. Any good historian knows you have to research your topic carefully, but he clearly didn’t see any reason to do that in this case. There are several dirty words people in our field use about people who approach historical questions that way; not my fault he doesn’t think this question’s important enough to merit the same approach. And, like I say, I won’t use you guys as a weapon to stop him from doing whatever he thinks he needs—or wants—to do. And I’ll never wave you two in anyone’s face afterward, either. Then again, I won’t have to. There really are people—quite a few of them, actually—on the faculty who are smart enough and open-minded enough to draw the correct conclusions without my breaking his kneecaps with you in public.”
“Breaking his kneecaps?” David asked. “Hey! I could get on board with that.”
“I don’t think that’s what Ben’s after,” Stephen said as he unzipped his own shooting bag to take out a .44 Ruger Model 5003 Redhawk revolver. He hadn’t been a shooter when he and David met, but he’d made up for it since.
David quirked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged as he swung out the cylinder and laid the weapon on the bench in front of him.
“Oh, don’t worry—it will ‘break his kneecaps,’ as you so charmingly put it, whatever else Ben’s trying to accomplish. But this is more of that ‘contrarian thinking’ of yours, isn’t it, Ben?”
“Yep,” Benjamin said, picking up one of Stephen’s speed loaders and fitting rounds into it. “The thing I hate most of all about what’s going on at Castle Rock right now is the way the intellectual climate’s so…shuttered on the assumption that if you believe Proposition A, then you must also accept Proposition B and likewise anathematize Proposition C. The way it rejects the possibility that anyone could conceivably be able to admit both sides can have valid points—and endorse the ones that are—if the minions of the ideological inquisition would only stop consigning each other to the intellectual equivalent of the outermost circle of Hell just really, really pisses me off. And it scares me, too. It scares me because of the groupthink involved, because of the intellectual narcissism behind it, and because that kind of polarization forecloses any kind of critical analysis of either side’s position. If you can’t analyze it you can’t treat it with the moral respect it deserves. And if it truly doesn’t deserve that respect, you can’t effectively refute it without at least understanding it first.”
He shook his head, his expression troubled.
“You know, the hell of it is that there really are people on the Castle Rock faculty who say all the ‘right’ things but are just as bigoted—whether it’s for or against gay rights, transgender rights, gun rights, religious rights, or God only knows what—as O’Hearn thinks I am. Some of them sit on what they really feel and never say a word about it in public, but that doesn’t make them any less closed-minded than the ones who scream from soapboxes and boycott speakers whose views they disapprove of, and our students damned well deserve better than that. I’m human enough to wish every single one of them recognized the sheer brilliance and intellectual purity of my own views, but they aren’t going to do that…and thank God for it! Because whether they agree with me or not, they need to engage their students honestly and critically. That’s their job—their responsibility, not just to the people paying tuition at CRU but to our entire society. If they’re not willing to do that, then they need to be shaken up just as much as someone like O’Hearn, when you come down to it.
“So in a way, I am willing to use you two as a club…sort of. If I go through this gender-sensitivity bullshit, and if the entire faculty thinks O’Hearn’s beaten me into submission despite my wrongheadedness, and then I invite my little brother and his husband to the next faculty reception, it may just open at least a few eyes to the possibility that imposing your own ideological preconceptions on what you think someone else believes can be…counterproductive. And if that helps me and Don Quixote bring down a few windmills, open the window of intellectual debate and mutual respect just a crack—which is what a college education is supposed to be about, damn it!—I’ll play the card you guys represent just as shamelessly as anyone could possibly ask.
“Which isn’t to say, of course,” he admitted with the quick, quirky grin of someone who might be just a bit embarrassed by his own intensity, “that I won’t also take a certain petty-minded, gloating relish out of O’Hearn’s expression when I introduce you to him!”
“Well, under the circumstances,” Stephen said, picking up the massive revolver and loading it smoothly, “and speaking for myself, I can live with that.”