On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

He would not admit defeat. Another of his father's principles had been: take care of the people who work for you. Perot could remember the whole family driving twelve miles on Sundays to visit an old black man who used to mow their lawn, just to make sure that he was well and had enough to eat. Perot's father would employ people he did not need, just because they had no job. Every year the Perot family car would go to the county fair crammed with black employees, each of whom was given a little money to spend and a Perot business card to show if anyone tried to give him a hard time. Perot could remember one who had ridden a freight train to California and, on being arrested for vagrancy, had shown Perot's father's business card. The sheriff had said: "We don't care whose nigger you are, we're throwing you in jail." But he had called Perot Senior, who had wired the train fare for the man to come back. "I been to California, and I'se back," the man said when he reached Texarkana; and Perot Senior gave him back his job.

Perot's father did not know what civil rights were: this was how you treated other human beings. Perot had not known his parents were unusual until he grew up.

His father would not leave his employees in jail. Nor would Perot.

He picked up the phone. "Get T. J. Marquez."

It was two in the morning, but T. J. would not be surprised: this was not the first time Perot had woken him up in the middle of the night, and it would not be the last.

A sleepy voice said: "Hello?"

"Tom, it doesn't look good."

"Why?"

"They haven't been released and the jail says they aren't going to be."

"Aw, damn."

"Conditions are getting worse over there--did you see the news?"

"I sure did."

"Do you think it's time for Simons?"

"Yeah, I think it is."

"Do you have his number?"

"No, but I can get it."

"Call him," said Perot.

3____

Bull Simons was going crazy.

He was thinking of burning down his house. It was an old woodframe bungalow, and it would go up like a pile of matchwood, and that would be the end of it. The place was hell to him--but it was a hell he did not want to leave, for what made it hell was the bittersweet memory of the time when it had been heaven.

Lucille had picked the place. She saw it advertised in a magazine, and together they had flown down from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to look it over. At Red Bay, in a dirt-poor part of the Florida Panhandle, the ramshackle house stood in forty acres of rough timber. But there was a two-acre lake with bass in it.

Lucille had loved it.

It was 1971, and time for Simons to retire. He had been a colonel for ten years, and if the Son Tay Raid could not get him promoted to general, nothing would. The truth was, he did not fit in the Generals' Club: he had always been a reserve officer, he had never been to a top military school such as West Point, his methods were unconventional, and he was no good at going to Washington cocktail parties and kissing ass. He knew he was a goddam fine soldier, and if that was not good enough, why, Art Simons was not good enough. So he retired, and did not regret it.

He had passed the happiest years of his life here at Red Bay. All their married life he and Lucille had endured periods of separation, sometimes as much as a year without seeing one another, during his tours in Vietnam, Laos, and Korea. From the moment he retired they were together all day and all night, every day of the year. Simons raised hogs. He knew nothing about farming, but he got the information he needed out of books, and built his own pens. Once the operation was under way he found there was not much to do but feed the pigs and look at them, so he spent a lot of time fooling around with his collection of 150 guns, and eventually set up a little gunsmithing shop where he would repair his and his neighbors' weapons and load his own ammunition. Most days he and Lucille would wander, hand in hand, through the woods and down to the lake, where they might catch a bass. In the evening, after supper, she would go to the bedroom as if she were preparing for a date, and come out later, wearing a housecoat over her nightgown and a red ribbon tied in her dark, dark hair, and sit on his lap ...

Memories like these were breaking his heart.

Even the boys had seemed to grow up, at last, during those golden years. Harry, the younger, had come home one day and said: "Dad, I've got a heroin habit and a cocaine habit and I need your help." Simons knew little about drugs. He had smoked marijuana once, in a doctor's office in Panama, before giving his men a talk on drugs, just so that he could tell them he knew what it was like; but all he knew about heroin was that it killed people. Still, he had been able to help Harry by keeping him busy, out in the open, building hog pens. It had taken a while. Many times Harry left the house and went into town to score dope, but he always came back, and eventually he did not go into town anymore.