… A scum-laden lake marks the northeasterly limit of safety for joggers in Central Park, New York City. Beyond the lake you wander at your own risk unless you are poor and black. This rule of thumb held good in the autumn of 1964 but the rich kid from Oklahoma had no knowledge of the dos and don’ts of Lower Harlem. Visiting his grandmother at her spacious apartment on Park Avenue, he had agreed to take her beagle for her evening walk in the nearby park.
Some five minutes’ walk into the scrub and glades that cover the region between the museum and the central reservoir, he found a grassy space, unleashed the beagle and threw her rubber ball. The dog, whose bouncy days were increasingly rare, broke into a halfhearted trot to show herself willing. She halted by the ball and turned back to the boy, tail wagging and grinning as only beagles can, when the six-inch bolt penetrated her neck. She fell without a sound.
The boy looked around. Three youths in bomber jackets stood in the shadows. One held a steel crossbow and, over his shoulder, an empty golfer’s bag.
“You’d better give the dawg his last rights, sonny.” The speaker had a crew cut and obviously spent a good deal of his time pumping iron.
The boy went wild, and rushing at the bowman, swung hard with the beagle’s chain. By chance the linked end caught the youth across one eye and the bridge of his nose.
“Scumbag bastard,” he cried out. He was temporarily blinded, but his friends pinned the boy against a tree to await his recovery. Through tears of pain, and fearing he had lost an eye, the bowman grunted his fury. “Strip the bugger and glue him to the tree. I’ll teach him who to mess with.”
Using his shirt and their own belts, they lashed the boy’s arms so that he faced outward. His handkerchief was jammed into his mouth. He wet himself with fear. Two bolts stuck his right leg above the knee. A third entered his left thigh and he fainted. The jeers of the bowman’s friends probably saved his life by attracting the attention of a jogger. The newcomer wore track suit trousers and a loose, jungle-green T-shirt. As he entered the clearing he showed little interest in the boy, the dog, or the yobs. “Hi, friends.” He raised a hand in greeting as he slowed. “Which way is the reservoir?”
As the bowman thought of a suitably unhelpful reply, the jogger’s hand whipped up and drove a finger into his good eye. This was followed immediately by a simple karate toe-kick, the ujima, to the groin of the nearest man. The third bomber jacket’s switchblade was out, but whipping the crossbow from the ground and finding it loaded, the jogger pulled the trigger. The file-sharpened bolt passed easily through the man’s guts and embedded itself in his spine. He screamed but the butt of the crossbow crashed down on the base of his neck and there was silence save for the chuckle of gray squirrels.
The jogger knelt beside the beagle and gently felt for a heartbeat. Applying counterpressure around the entire hole, he withdrew the bolt and tied his vest around the dog’s neck. “You’ll live, girl,” he crooned as he stroked the bitch’s droopy ears. He laid her down and attended to the boy, suspecting heavy internal bleeding in the thigh.
He found a traffic policeman on nearby East 85th Street, gave him his name, Captain Daniel de Villiers, and the address of the fellow Marine with whom he lodged. He stayed until an ambulance came, but feigned ignorance when asked about the state of the hoodlums, the boy, and the dog. He wondered to himself, would he have intervened were it not for the beagle? Cruelty to animals was a weak spot with de Villiers.
There had been a stray cat at the boys’ orphanage in Vancouver, and later, an ill-fed parrot kept by his adoptive mother in the Bronx, a woman whom he never understood, since she beat him for the mildest infringement of her “good manners code” yet nursed him with apparent affection whenever he came home from school with a split nose or swollen eyebrow. When she died, coughing blood, de Villiers took a daytime job as a photographer’s assistant and cat-burgled by night. When the parrot died he was seventeen with savings in the bank and no ambition but to work with animals. He enlisted, but his phenomenal physique and propensity for measured thought attracted the attention of a Marine Corps recruitment sergeant long before he could home in on his original target, the U.S. Veterinary Corps.
At twenty-three, with four harrowing years in Vietnam behind him, de Villiers might well have made the military his career. Perhaps he would have done so but for a long-festering desire to seek his roots, to find his family.
For a year he held down a desk job at Bradley Airport, spending free weekends trekking in the Catskills with Marine friends. In the winter of 1964 he resigned his commission and cashed all his savings. His only clue was his father’s bible, his most treasured possession. The flyleaf was inscribed “For Piet from his loving mother. Vrede Huis, Tokai 1891…”