The Trinity Read Online Free PDF

Crowley has decorated it with abstract paintings and tapestries, and on the mantel stands a small and simple swastika made out of black iron on an iron pedestal.
    Hinckley and Rodgers nudge each other as they both see it at the same time. Both are shocked, and despite the history lessons to which neither paid much attention, neither of them is offended.
    Crowley feels trepidation as their gazes linger above the mantel. He studies their faces in that priestly way, looking for signs of emotion, but each face remains blank. They continue to look about the room.
    “Sit down, sit down.” Crowley points to a dusty couch with greasy upholstery that came as part of the furnishings. He wanders off to the kitchen and retrieves three cans of beer, British cans, tall, taller than an American can of beer.
    “So, tell me,” Crowley says, “where are you two from?”
    Nebraska, Missouri.
    “Really? What part?”
    “Jus’ outside of Cape Girardeau.”
    “All over, but I guess you could say Grand Island because I was born there.”
    And it is true; Hinckley had a vagabond childhood spread across the eastern part of Nebraska. He had been born out of wedlock. His mother went from town to town, relative to relative, boyfriend to boyfriend, working mainly as a waitress, sometimes as a bartender. Grand Island to Lincoln to Omaha to West Point, back to Omaha to Norfolk, back to Grand Island and Omaha again.
    Depending on the nature of her current relationship, Hinckley’s mother would drop him off at her parents’ house to live, a house in a less desirable part of Omaha that used to be more desirable. He would live with them for months at a time and would attend school there, and in the school, he would be a definite minority, a fact that disturbed his bigoted grandfather to no end.
    “Niggers,” his grandfather would say, “have ruined this town, have ruined this neighborhood. They all sit around and do nothing except kill each other over drugs and wait for welfare checks. They don’t work, and when they do, they’re lazy. I ain’t never met a good one yet. Shit, when I was growing up before that god-damned Martin Luther King showed up, they all worked, did as they was told. But now, hell… I ain’t met a decent one yet.”
    His grandparents had long paid for the house they lived in and couldn’t afford to move. Due to emphysema, his grandfather couldn’t work. He had been drawing disability and later on Social Security, and those monthly checks could only go so far. He sat in the living room of their old bungalow watching the sidewalk decay and the parade of longtime neighbors move and pass away. He didn’t venture out much. He had to keep an oxygen tank by his side, so he watched a lot of television, the back of the set against the picture window in the living room, so he could look outside and watch television at the same time. He felt he had to keep an eye on his property.
    Brad dreaded and feared school. He felt isolated because of his color, felt the fear of the blacks because of his grandfather. Brad would rush home and watch television with his grandfather and only do a cursory amount of homework. On Saturdays in the autumn, their attention turned to college football. They would watch the Nebraska games with a rabid passion; nothing else in the world mattered, and they would spend the preceding week in anticipation of the upcoming game.
    Sundays, his grandmother would drag the adolescent Hinckley to Mass, to a church over the Missouri River in Council Bluffs. He would sit stone-faced and inattentive, his thoughts anywhere but on the Mass in front of him. The words of the homily would not reach beyond his ears, and the concepts of Jesus and God and love never meant anything to him.
    Ultimately, his mother would leave her boyfriend or get left by a boyfriend and she would come back to Omaha and stay with her parents for a while, until school let out, and then it was off to Wahoo or Norfolk or wherever there was a place