The Laws of our Fathers kc-4 Page 27

  *

  With the news the following morning, I came to believe that I'd been briefly wrested from sleep by the boom of what I took for a storm. That remains my memory – a single vague concussive pock bouncing off the clouds. I'm still not certain.

  I was in the shower just after 5:00, when I heard footsteps thundering up the stairs – a determined pounding, oblivious of the hour. There was a single phenomenal bang overhead, which seemed to shake the building, and then, I was sure, shouting. I opened the front door of the apartment and saw three Damon coppers on the landing. They were in full battle gear, helmets and shiny boots and bulletproof vests. They had their riot batons drawn. One of them saw me and said, 'Get back inside.' I had only a towel around my waist, but even half-naked I found that my reflexive regard for high authority had fled.

  'Go fuck yourself,' I replied. It was a sign of how my sense was failing. He reared back as if he had been struck, lifting his baton from his side.

  There were shouts from above, and footfalls again shook the wooden stairwell so hard I could feel them. With his arms cuffed from behind, Eddgar was pushed down the steps with a cop at each side.

  'What the hell?' I asked.

  I thought Eddgar smiled as he went by. His dark hair was tousled and he wore pants but no shoes and socks. The three cops, including the one who was prepared to hit me, took off to clear the way. They wrestled Eddgar down the stairs and threw him in the back of a squad car parked below whose noisy radio voice I'd heard but hadn't really noted. When I looked up, June stood a few feet in front of her threshold in her long white night shift, clutching Nile, who wore solely his large diaper. Only now he began to cry. Behind them, I could see the door of the apartment, smashed off the hinges and split; fresh wood was revealed in the rent, as with a lightning-struck tree.

  'What in God's name?' I brought them into my apartment. June was shaking. I dressed Nile and laid him down on my sofa. The diaper, of course, was soaked. I spent a great deal of time soothing him, and June soon joined me. Apparently, he had not seen most of it, but Nile was awake as his father had been cuffed and hustled out. June and I kept assuring him that Eddgar was all right. Finally, he accepted our advice and with little warning went back to sleep. June and I sat in the kitchen, drinking tea and whispering. 'They just broke in?'

  'They said they had an arrest warrant. I never saw it.' She lit a cigarette. In an act of hapless modesty, she had thrown an old green knitted shawl over herself before leaving her apartment. She sat in my kitchen in her cotton nightdress, clutching her bare arms.

  'For what? What are they busting him for?'

  She pondered her cigarette. 'The bomb,' she said. 'Last night. About 1:oo in the morning actually – the ARC was bombed. The whole west wing of the building was destroyed. Most of the labs over there.' She described the explosion scene, dust and bricks blown a quarter of a mile.

  I asked about injuries.

  'The building was -' she said and stopped. 'You'd think the building would be empty. They're saying -' June faltered again. 'Someone was in his lab late. One of the profs. He's hospitalized. They claim he lost his hand, an arm.'

  'Oh God. And they arrested Eddgar for it?'

  'This is what it's going to be like. Now. I keep telling him that. This is what the faculty did. This is what they've intended. They've stripped away the last vestiges – the last protective plumage of class membership. This is going to happen again and again. Any occasion. Any excuse. It doesn't matter how careful we are. You understand that, don't you?' She leaned toward me with rare directness and grasped my hand. Over time, my relationship with June had acquired a subtle confidential air, beginning, I guess, the day I saw her in all her glory on Michael's threshold. On nights she was home before Eddgar, she poured herself two fingers of bourbon, an indulgence she occasionally allowed herself, particularly outside his presence, and talked to me about her household. With the tumbler in hand, she could emit a languorous air, taking all her weight on her heels, an elbow laid on the kitchen countertop. Sometimes she worried out loud about Nile – his social adjustment, his reading. Occasionally there were candid remarks about Eddgar, issued as her eye rose to meet mine above her glass, which I knew I was expected to maintain in strictest privacy. For me, she was a bit of a confidante, as well. I told her about my parents and of course, as I did with everyone else I knew, poured out my anguish to her about my breakup with Sonny. But she spoke to me now as I imagined she talked to someone else, someone who knew her far better than I did.

  'We have to get out of here,' June said, 'I keep telling him that. He won't listen, he doesn't care, he thinks he's prepared for what's coming. He wants it to happen to him. He still believes that suffering is good for the soul. He's still wound up in so many crazy ideas. I keep telling him to think about Nile. And he keeps asking me if I don't love the revolution, repeating that a child can't be harmed by the truth.' She stubbed out the cigarette emphatically. She massaged her neck and wondered aloud if she should have a drink to collect herself, and then concluded that it would be better not to get started, the day would be difficult enough.

  With her own thoughts, she stood and strolled barefoot about the apartment. The tassels of the shawl were brought close to her mouth. I was struck how Eddgar's enigma loomed even to June, more unfathomable than these strange events. She paused before the empty bookcases along the walls, relics of Sonny's departure. The thought of my troubles apparently provided a respite from her own.

  'How's the heart?' she asked.

  'A mess.' During the days, I had taken to repeatedly playing on my phonograph a terrible overproduced version of 'You Keep Me Hangin' On,' by Vanilla Fudge. With the music at 10, I screamed along with the mounting clamor of cymbals and the whining guitars. Everyone for three blocks must have known I was in agony.

  'Have you spoken?'

  'She calls. To make me crazy. Every other night.' Sonny was being responsible, not abandoning the cripple, making me vow that I'd see her before I left. They were brief thwarted conversations in which I pivoted between rage and terrible longing.

  'There is surely nothing like young love,' said June dolefully. I spent an instant trying to imagine the Eddgars at this stage, as young lovers, still on the threshold with each other. What he saw in her seemed clear to me: one of those bold girls, a rebel beneath the veneer of genteel manners. He was wedding courage. A man could never have too much of that on his own. But why did she choose him? Eddgar was going to be a preacher then, and she a preacher's wife. She had to know she wasn't one for the country club, the cotillions, or the teas. Why him? Why Eddgar? His commitments, I thought, they must have shone with the power of the sun. She must have had some tussle with herself. She must have thought she was going to purify herself in the fiery forge of Eddgar's faith. Idle guesses, but they came to me with the mettle of conviction. She had finally settled again at the small table beside her teacup and lit another cigarette.

  'I still don't understand what gives with the cops?' I said. 'How could they blame Eddgar? After last night?' I told her about what had happened on Campus Boul. More than a hundred people had gathered before the Damon cops had moved everyone along. 'People are really pissed now. Really pissed. It could have been anybody, right?'

  'Right,' June said dully. Her eye did not meet mine. Instead, she looked through a ring of smoke. 'Look. It's all ridiculous. They know he's covered. They don't care. They'd know he'd have to be covered. Let them assume what they like. Whatever they like. After all of this, could he possibly be that careless? He was with his lawyers until almost 3:00 last night. The same men who are going to bail him out can alibi him. But they don't care.'

  She touched the shawl to her eyes. 'They're probably going to come back for me soon. I should count myself lucky they didn't take me now. Will you look after Nile?'

  'Of course, but that's not going to happen.' I tried to comfort her, but she was convinced she was in peril, that Eddgar and she were now the targets of unreasoning oppression. 'Were yo
u with the lawyers, too?' I asked her.

  'Most of the time. I left about midnight.'

  The bomb, she had said, was at 1:00. Her eyes lit on mine and then deflected a bit.

  'And?' I asked.

  'What?'

  'Can you account for yourself?' I sounded stiff: enough to be my father.

  'If it comes to that,' she answered, and then canted her head vaguely across the kitchen, indicating the wall that adjoined Michael's place. She closed her eyes momentarily, smote by some new pain that crimped her mouth. 'You might as well know,' she said. 'He was quite upset. Quite. He didn't take this news very well. He's appalled. Completely appalled. His life is in those labs. He could have been there. He knows this man.' She dropped her head into her hands. When she lifted her face, worn by worry, she looked right at me. 'He thinks he was betrayed,' she said.

  On the way to work, I joined the little dribble of gawkers who had already come up the road to the ARC. The iron gates were drawn closed and you could see that the police were out and ready to cordon off the road farther down toward campus. I was astonished that at 6 a.m., in the weak light of sunrise, I was not the sole spectator. Cars were parked along the gravel road and we all stood, twenty or thirty of us, with our hands to the bars, as if we were at the zoo. The others seemed to be people who had driven down from the city and the bedroom burbs of Alameda to see what a bomb really does. What it did in this case was to gouge up a substantial crater in which the scattered rubble of the building was heaped – bricks, glass, plaster, pieces of pipe, the odd randomly intact remnants of walls and floor tile. Hours later, there was still an impression of dust in the air. An entire projecting wing of the building was gone. It looked like the remains after the wrecking ball. A latticework of iron supports between the walls and floors was revealed at points, while a lone beam, corkscrewed by the force, protruded from the portion of the building that was standing, along with twisted piping and a single strand of black wire, balled up like a kink of hair where the walls were torn away. The fractioned remains of the third floor – risers, subfloor, three blown-out windows, and a piece of a lab table – hung midair at a 40-degree angle. And the roof was torn off, even where the walls looked sound, so that the building reminded you of a bald-headed man. Out on the lawn of the facility, a yellow tape barrier had been stretched. Beside me, a portly, grey-haired man, with a plaid shirt and plastic pocket protector, pointed out to his wife a chunk of brick, resting on the lawn, which needed to be mowed.

  I was late for work, but unconcerned. My final day would be tomorrow. I'd taken my transistor and, on the hour, I stopped wherever I was along my delivery route to listen to news. Nixon's speech had brought a turbulent reaction on campuses across the country. At Ohio State University, one hundred students had been arrested, three wounded and seventy more injured in an angry confrontation with National Guardsmen, who had shot at them with rubber bullets to break up an anti-war demonstration. Twenty thousand people were expected in New Haven to rally in support of Bobby Seale, the co-chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was on trial there along with twenty other Panthers, charged with conspiring to murder a snitch named Alex Rackley. But the accounts of the ARC bombing dominated the local news. The injured physicist was in surgery at the Damon Medical Center, and the radio reports said more than ten people had been taken in for questioning.

  Listening to the accounts, I felt vaguely vindicated, almost cheerful. The world was being made to pay for its madness. I was in the city, in Noe Valley, filling a coin box on 18th Street, when I heard a report that shrunk my innards in panic. FBI, ATF, and police experts, sifting the debris at the ARC, had come up with a number of items that they believed had been used to prepare the device. Included were the scorched remains of a single can of battery acid.

  I had no idea what to do about Hobie. We had not spoken in weeks. I told myself again and again that he wasn't involved, that it was a stupid coincidence, but of course I could not accept that. On my way home, near 3:00, I stopped at Graeme's. I'd brought along the last of Sonny's boxes. I had been determined simply to leave them by the door, but now she was the only person I could think of to give me cool counsel about Hobie. I rang the bell a number of times. The sky was clear, the day thin and cool, and various bright blooms struggled toward the sunshine in the large garden that fronted Graeme's coach house.

  'Sahib.' Graham opened the door and rubbed his eyes. He had been sleeping. He was in his American briefs. 'You wish?'

  'I'd like a word with Sonny.'

  'Klonsky? Haven't seen her all week, mate. More. The gypsy moth that one. Here and there. Waiting tables down at Robson's. Two shifts. Trying to raise a treasury for her departure. Peace Corps thing seems ready to commence. Going to the Philippines, she is.'

  She'd shared the news with me during her last call.

  'Colorful locale, I suppose,' said Graeme. 'Whole gambit's a bit unclear to me, I must say. In a dither, really. Beneath the cool exterior. My estimate, at least.'

  As much as I hated him, it was consoling to hear a judgment so close to mine. Over time, I'd begun to take Graeme's measure. He played a sort of showboat Brit, more English than the Queen. He made few accommodations to the American vocabulary, and uttered Anglicisms whenever he could, as if he remained convinced that the War of Independence had not been decided on cultural merit. At moments, his voice trilled in his Oxford accent; at other times he sounded like a Cockney chimney sweep. He had more shapes than Caliban, a man for all moments, who placed himself above American culture and who, I see now, would have run for hiding if anyone mentioned returning to his homeland. He savored American freedom, and the transposition he'd made to a realm where no one thought the less of his middle-class accent.

  ' Step in, Kemosabe. Neighbor-types get their knickers in a knot when I go traipsing about in my johnnies.' He offered me coffee or tiger's milk, but I went no farther than the foyer to drop Sonny's things. Without the exotic party scene, the house was appealing, small but lovely, with marks of money and intellect that reminded me of University Park: simple sofas and large paintings on the walls bristling with emotion, many Mexican artifacts, and rugs thrown down at angles. The tasteful furnishings struck a false note against the sybaritic life Graeme led here. I expected the odor of fucking to linger like traces from a litter box.

  He mentioned the bombing, naturally. University people today were speaking of little else. On Campus Boul in the morning, a trio of hippies, lit up on crystal meth, were rambling up and down the walks, crooning that the rev had begun.

  ‘I heard they like found a can of battery acid at the scene. Any idea, man, what that's about?'

  'Battery acid,' repeated Graeme. He hadn't heard that. 'Not too surprising, I'd say. Chemical name sulfuric acid. One of your principal ingredients in nitroglycerine, which every anarchist and revo knows can be mixed with paraffin, guncotton, a few other items to make plastique.' He nodded, satisfied as always with his vast learning.

  'What about sandbags?' I asked. 'They wouldn't have anything to do with this, right?' 'Au contraire, laddie. When you've got your high-powered explosive ready to go, you direct it by tamping. Create an aperture for the explosive force. Sandbags the best, apparently. Well-placed sandbag very important to effective bombing, so they say.' Graeme scratched his nose. I could not move now. Hobie, I thought. Oh Jesus, Hobie. Graeme was watching me carefully.

  'Any little bugger we hold near and dear involved with this battery acid and sandbags?' he asked. Graeme's revolution was made in the bedroom, where the persons present could become a universe without rules, where their conduct could be as uniquely personal as it is within a dream. Otherwise, he preferred peace. As he'd made clear since I met him, he didn't approve of the Eddgars.

  'It was just a story I heard, Graeme.'

  'That so, love? Plenty of stories about. Bloody place is fucking rife with rumor, I'd say. Mythopoesy at work. Psychedelic era, what? Hard to tell fantasy from reality all round. Wouldn't give you twopence for most of what
people say.' He eyed me coolly – contemptuously. 'Jolly good moment to step forward, I'd think. Sell out or watch out, that'd be my advice. Sides have been chosen, love. Best recognize that.'

  I wasn't sure if he was trying to wring information from me or do me a favor. He passed me a penetrating look, clearly meant in warning, and then nodded his whitish pageboy toward the door. He said he'd tell Sonny I'd come by.

  By the time I got home from work, near 4:00, Eddgar had been released. As it turned out, the Damon town police had rounded up the usual suspects – every rad they could find from One Hundred Flowers. Kellett, Eddgar, Cleveland Marsh. Six or seven others. Members of Eddgar's organization had stood vigil outside the police station most of the day, shouting slogans; I felt some momentary guilt that I had not joined them. Around 2:00, Eddgar's lawyers had filed a petition in court, and the police, rather than undergo the hearing, had released him and most of the others. They told Eddgar and the reporters that he remained a suspect. The only one who was still in custody was Cleveland. When they'd picked him up, they'd found four pounds of cocaine and more than one thousand cellophane-wrapped hits of LSD in his apartment. He would be charged with felonies. As Eddgar told me about all of this, I had another anxious thought of Hobie. I knew better than to ask Eddgar about Hobie's role, since revolutionary discipline would prohibit acknowledging anything, but I felt sick with the notion of the phone call I might have to make to Gurney Tuttle.

  Near dinner, I went next door to see Michael. He was sitting in the dark in an old easy chair. He wore only blue jeans. His long feet and sinewy chest were bare. As June had suggested, he was shattered.

  'You okay?'

  He lifted a hand to the light. His eyes were red, swimming in sorrow. His head was crushed back in the chair, matted against his own goldish dreadlocks.