+++Name: "The name's Roland Bedard; Doctor Roland Bedard, M.D. That's Doc Bedard, to most folks in the parish; Mister Bedard means my father, even now that he's worm's food. I expect that my name was my momma's doing: Roland, the great romantic French hero, dying for no damn reason, blowing on his horn with no one to hear. I despise this name: its bathos, its parochial self-indulgence. But I intend to give it a different meaning soon enough."
+++Age: "I'm forty-three: more than ten years older than Robert, four years older than Lily Anne. I have not wasted any of those years; I have learned from all of them."
+++Gender: "I am a man, I suppose. But not a man like other men. I am more than the sum of my flesh, and the unexamined expectations of swaggering morons mean very little to me."
+++Physical appearance: "I am neither tall nor short, neither burly nor skinny: five-ten, one-seventy. Or thereabouts, anyway. When I was in 'Nam, there was very little fat on me, and I still look very lean; even now, I can see the corded muscle beneath the skin of my forearms. I do not smoke, do not drink, eat only sparingly, exercise every day. My body looks it. My face is, perhaps, a few years older than my true age, and my hair is already starting to turn salt-and-pepper. My eyes are an unusual color: a sort of blued gunmetal. I like these eyes; they seem truly mine, not just part of the body I make do with."
+++Identifying Marks: "None, really. I have no tattoos; I've never seen the point. No scars, either. I would not be who I am if people could make me bleed."
* * *
+++Ethnicity: "I am white, and Cajun. My mother, and probably Robert too, will tell you about how our people came here four hundred years ago, and carved this place out of the bayou, and so on and so forth. I do not give a damn about any of that. I have known plenty of strong black men, and strong Viets, and weak Cajuns. A man's usefulness is not determined by his family tree. And I have no interest in the useless."
+++Religion: "I go to the Catholic church for holidays. Christmas, Easter, baptisms. Good for keeping up appearances, and I don't mind it. I do believe in God, you know. Not Jesus, whimpering on the cross, dying a victim's death. This is a god for cattle who deserve their culling. But God the lawgiver, God who
creates right and wrong instead of being bound by them, God who hands down life and death and silences Job in a roar of thunder? I talk to Him all the time. Really, He is the only one who understands me, and I am the only one who understands Him."
+++Birthplace: "I was born in South Palmyra, right down the street at the medical clinic. I wonder about that, sometimes - in what sense it was really
me, that bloodsoaked soft-skinned thing? The Stoics believed that the human soul didn't fully enter the body until fourteen years of age. I think that they may have been right."
+++Criminal History: "Prison is for morons. I've never been arrested. I do not intend to be. Once punishment is factored out, I do not think that crime makes sense any more as a conceptual category. I killed a man in New Orleans, when I was a medical student. It was a learning experience. I killed other men in Vietnam; that was a learning experience too. I sold a half-million dollars' worth of opium, which was less interesting, but very satisfying. Some of those things were "against the law;" others were not. But there was no possibility that I would be punished for any of them. So in concrete terms, what does it mean to say that killing a New Orleans grifter was a crime, but killing a VC sympathizer was not? It's an exercise in sophistry."
+++Military History: "I was seven years with the CIA in Vietnam, mostly in the Phoenix Program. They recruited me right out of a medical residency; they wanted someone with professional skills to assist in interrogation, and my role expanded from there until I was hunting down VC sympathizers all over the Mekong Delta, one hamlet at a time. Best years of my life, really. There was no false consciousness, no arbitrary limitations on human capacity. I could be who I really am. That was exactly what they intended, in fact. So we all got what we wanted, and the only pity is that it had to end eventually."
+++Psychological analysis: "Oh, I'm a psychopath. I mean, come on - I graduated top of my class from Tulane Medical School. Did you really believe I was too stupid to diagnose that much?
"I am qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from other human beings. They are things of flesh: extrapolations from petty prejudice and animal lust, cultural programming and biological imperative. I am not. The medical textbooks would call this a delusion, but they are mistaken, and I can prove that fact empirically. It's quite simple: I can predict other people with near-perfect accuracy, because they are no more than the logically necessary outcome of their programming. But they cannot predict me; they cannot begin to understand what drives me. I do not become anxious or depressed; I do not doubt myself; I am not subject to prejudice of race or creed or color. I accept the evidence of my eyes without hesitation or rationalization. I set my own programming. What better evidence of superiority could I possibly require?
"This is not to say that people are useless. They have their uses. For example, I want to understand as much as I can about the world. Plenty of people are smart enough to have discovered a great deal about it. I am more than happy to learn from those scientists and philosophers; it's why I read so much. I love the arts, too; I think there's a lot to learn from beauty. Or, for instance, I want to destroy anyone who can hurt me. Plenty of people are strong enough, or good enough with a gun, or skilled enough with explosives to help do that. I am more than happy to make use of them; to recognize aptitude, and reward it. Even people's weaknesses are useful. For example, I want to be rich, because I can appreciate certain comforts. People who buy liquor and dope, because their lives have exceeded their capacities, make me money. I appreciate their weakness.
"So I don't hate people, you understand. I am not some sadist, lashing out at humanity for my own hedonistic satisfaction. In fact, I even grow attached to people, in the same way that I grow attached to a car or a knife that works particularly well. I treasure my sister Lily Anne as much as I treasure anything I own, and even the most useless Bedards are still, in some sense, significant to me - they have acquired a kind of entertainment value from their long familiarity, I suppose. Even Momma - irritating as she can be, just because she's so damn uninteresting in every possible way - is like some tasteless painting that's been hanging on my wall for so long that I'll miss her when she's gone.
"Still: in the end, the fact is that people are no more than the sum of their parts. All I have to do is understand their cultural and biological programming, and I can make them dance like marionnettes. But there are no strings on me, and folk love me for it: because they sense that they are in the presence of greatness, and when they are with me, they know that everything will be okay. I don't begrudge them that. After all, they're right."
* * *
+++Alignment: "I am the head of the Bedard family. I have been since '72, pretty much. Pa didn't have what it took to do what was necessary after Lily Anne got shot. I did. So I was calling the shots well before he died, and afterward, no one questioned it when I moved into the big house. I have uncles who are older than me, and Robert runs the police, and Momma still has some influence. But everyone knows that nothing moves south of the Gossett Bridge without my say-so."
+++Occupation: "I guess you could say I'm a businessman, or even an investor. I own a majority share in the bank, the Bedard Timber Company, and the South Street Gameroom. And I take my cut of every pill, drink, girl, and town contract that gets sold in South Palmyra. That's where the money comes from. But my occupation? I still think of myself as a doctor, I suppose. I even have admitting privileges at the Medical Center, although I haven't used them in years. It's my profession, after all."
* * *
+++Biography: "I killed a dog when I was nine. That was when I knew who I was.
"I can't hardly remember anything before that, to be honest. I wonder if that was the moment when I was ensouled, like the Stoics thought; if everything before that was just my body knitting itself together, waiting to
become. I grew up, learned to speak and walk and read and write, learned that I was Tom Bedard's eldest son and heir, learned that everything in Oxbow Parish would have been mine but for those damned Fauberts. I learned to shoot rabbits and bow my head in church and go fishing. I learned to stay away from the men who came back from Okinowa or Bastogne when they got too quiet. I must have learned those things. But they happened to someone else.
"But one day when I was nine, I was out west of town with my little .22, and Ralph Sullivan's hound came wandering across the creek. And I wanted to know what it would feel like. So I shot the dog, and then I splashed across the creek and sat down next to it until the blood and the whimpering stopped. I timed it on my watch. It took two minutes and forty-nine seconds.
"That was when I knew who I was.
"When I got older, I figured out that people were a lot like that dog. You just had to take different sorts of measurements. I was smarter than my pa, and a lot smarter than my momma, and I learned when to show that and when to hide it, because the old man got angry when his fifteen-year-old kid used words he couldn't understand. I learned to listen carefully, to find the times when people talk most openly. I started having sex mostly because I was fascinated by the way girls would talk afterwards, the things about themselves they'd just give away for free. I read my way through the library, and wondered how much to believe of what there was in books. I learned math less from school and more from studying the timber company's books, which Pa left to smarter men than himself. I found some discrepancies, and didn't tell anyone for years, because I already knew to save an advantage when you had it.
"All those years, my sister Lily Anne was the only one I really valued. Robert was too little, and my parents were too uninteresting. But Lily Anne - she was younger, and growing up, she always knew that Roland was just Roland. She never expected me to be any different. I always found that extraordinary: uncommon, compelling, unique. She was like a handwritten book; something about her was not interchangeable with other people. She never bored me.
"My folks paid for my college: Tulane. Off to New Orleans. Korea had just wrapped up, and they were worried about the draft. Didn't want me shipped off if the Big One arrived with the Russians. And my momma wanted the prestige of a graduate in the family, though she didn't give a damn for the education itself. So I headed to the big city, and got teased for my country French, and pretended to care.
"College was great, honestly. I wonder, ever since, if I haven't been chasing that feeling a little bit: of
learning so much so quickly, understanding the world so much better each day than I did the day before. It wasn't just the classes. Now, I relished those, and got excellent grades, even though I didn't care about GPA at all; why would I assume any professor had the right to judge
me? But it wasn't just the classes. It was the city: its Irish and Italian and black and Cajun and Creole neighborhoods, its brothels and bars and libraries and restaurants, its museums and monuments. Everywhere you looked, there was something new to understand. I could feel myself expanding, like a plant unfurling toward the sun.
"I went to Tulane Medical School because I couldn't stand the thought of going back to Palmyra. There was too much more to learn, in the classroom and out. I considered anthropology, or some such field, instead of med school. Mostly, I wanted to understand people. I already sensed that they weren't like me; that they were acting out scripts, following programming that they themselves didn't understand or control. I wanted to be able to read those scripts myself. I figured that the programming had to be partly cultural, but also partly biological. I went to med school to understand the latter part.
"It was enjoyable for a few years. But then it became boring, and ultimately frustrating. I realized that these doctors believed that their job was to heal people, not to answer the important questions. And if you think that way, you'll never understand what really matters. So I kept my grades up, and smiled along when I was invited to professors' homes, and I played them like I've always played everyone, since I learned to do it to Pa to keep his anger and fear away when he realized he didn't understand me at all. And I decided to answer the important questions myself. I prepared for six weeks: finding the vagrant, tracking his movements, preparing the basement in a condemned building in Gravier. Then I bought a surgical kit, and a bottle of chloroform, and I spent three days with him before he died. I learned more from those three days, about how and why people really are the way they are, than I did from the last two years of medical school.
"I think it was sometime during medical school that Pa finally figured out I didn't intend to come back. Robert left too, after that, I think. I had other things to think about.
"I finished med school and passed the licensing exam and took a residency at Tulane Lakeside. It was obnoxious, boring work. I did it because it was better than going home, and I needed the money. I figured that, if I was careful, I could keep taking one vagrant a year without anyone connecting the dots, and I'd learn the worthwhile things outside the hospital instead. But history intervened.
"The real story is long and complicated, but the simple version is this: the CIA wanted to recruit doctors to assist interrogations in Vietnam. This was '65, and the Phoenix Program was just starting up. The AMA decided it was unethical, and Tulane Lakeside agreed. I reached out to the Agency myself: literally mailed them a letter. Three weeks later, I was on a plane to Da Nang.
"I'm not going to tell you the details about the next seven years. At first, my job was to supervise interrogations, and make sure that the Provincial Reconnaissance Units didn't kill detainees before they talked. There have been congressional reports, since, about the exact techniques we used. You can find them at the library, if you're interested. Suffice to say that it was useful to have a doctor around if you wanted to keep the detainee alive for more than an hour or two. Eventually, my new colleagues found that I wasn't squeamish, and I learned to speak pretty good Vietnamese, so I took over the interrogations myself. When we got jumped by the VC, it turned out that my childhood bagging varmints had prepared me pretty well to bag guerillas; I didn't spook when the prey started shooting back. So I started going into the field for snatch-and-grabs, pulling farmers out of villages and -
convincing them to identify communist cadres. After '68, the Agency pretty much stopped even attempting oversight of local operations, as long as we were putting bodies in the ground. A bunch of guys on my team started taking ears and stringing them onto necklaces. I set a few hundred terrified villagers to work farming poppies, and opium sales made me half a million dollars in two years. If MACV knew, it didn't care.
"I loved 'Nam. Loved it. Best years of my life. It was a hypocrisy-free zone. Now, I didn't give a damn about the fight against communism; as far as I was concerned, the mandate to get results was arbitrary. But the war was great because, in service of that bullshit mandate, we were judged only on our ability to turn villagers into intelligence, and intelligence into dead communists. And that left no room for canting pieties, or hypocritical morality, or smothering convention intended to suppress human excellence and originality. You could be whatever you were, do whatever you wanted, and nobody gave a damn as long as you were good at it. The guys above me in the Phoenix Project chain of command - they had me diagnosed in six months, and they appreciated me all the more for it. It was a world built as perfectly to liberate me as the normal world is built to straitjacket me. I slept like a baby every single night, and never dreamed.
"But all good things come to an end. Every once in a while, infuriating as it is, a cliche is true like that. We lost the war. By '72, it was clear that the US was leaving Vietnam. But the PRUs - we were so far gone by then that I wasn't sure we were ever going to get an order to pull out. We may just have been a black-bag account at the embassy by that time, an anonymous monthly cash payment that nobody even questioned. There wasn't going to be a withdrawal for us. The only question was when we wanted to walk away.
"I was taking some R&R in Saigon in June of '72 when I got a letter. There'd been a gunfight in Palmyra. My cousin Rick had gotten in an argument with some Faubert boys, and tempers flared, and they pulled their guns. Lily Anne wasn't supposed to be there, but she was. She stepped in the middle of things, tried to calm everyone down. The first bullet severed her spine. She was in critical condition.
"So I went home. Vietnam was over anyway. I put five hundred grand in drug money in a duffel bag, and just walked away from the war, and nobody ever came looking for me. They understood, I guess. The perfect end to a perfect war.
"Lily Anne survived. She'll never walk again, though. And I was very, very angry, because the world would have been a much uglier and less interesting place without her in it, and it very nearly was. But Pa did not like that I was back, and didn't want to turn me loose. He wanted to be cautious, to wait for our moment to pay the Fauberts back, to hew to some convenient code of bayou chivalry. He would have been waiting for years. And I wasn't interested in that.
"Still. I was proportionate. Lily Anne wasn't dead, after all. Old Man Faubert had a niece, maybe thirty years old. I used a tourniquet, and delivered her to the ER when I was finished. Then I mailed the old man her feet. One cripple for each family: the scales were even.
"Pa understood, after that. He stepped aside. Nothing official, no big announcement, but everyone got the message. Things were different, now that I was back, and Pa didn't want any part of it any more. The bank and the lumber company started sending me their monthly earning reports, and Robert eventually accepted my invitation to come back from New Orleans and take over the police. When Pa died a few years ago, the changing of the guard became official. I moved into the big house, and Ma moved into a nice guest house on the grounds, and I took a hard look around and tried to decide what to do with this parish.
"It's been eight years, now, I suppose, since I got back from 'Nam. I still find it a little strange: I really never thought I'd be back, much less filling my pa's shoes. But I have to admit: they've been pretty good years. There's plenty of money, and I can mail-order all the books I want, and buy the occasional painting or sculpture from a gallery in New Orleans. It's not quite as free as 'Nam, but wealth and power can buy you a lot of latitude in a small parish, and the truth is that I don't miss the violence. It was the honesty of the war that I treasured, not the brutality - and Palmyra has an honesty of its own, sometimes. Besides: there are opportunities opening up here, cocaine and maybe even oil, big business. An interesting challenge; one that I'll enjoy figuring out.
"Well, I've appreciated this talk. But we both know I can't have you repeating it. Now, hush, now. Hush-a-bye. I already told you - I'm not a sadist. I'm a doctor. And I promise this won't hurt at all."
#ItWillBeDone (DO NOT REMOVE)