The Laws of Our Fathers Page 27

  He looked up to be sure he had my attention. The voice of a neighbor's TV drifted through the apartment, a commercial for a fast-food chain that seemed boldly inappropriate.

  'Now I don't know a thing about you and your father, Seth. But let me tell you this much: Free yourself. If you are going to do something as dramatic as running away from your country and allowing some grand jury to indict you and the FBI to hunt for you coast to coast - make sure that it's not for nothing and that you are free on your own terms. If you can't make my revolution, then make your own revolution. Make the revolution you can -and triumph at it. That's what I say.'

  He lifted up his sleeping boy and barely brought his lips to Nile's brow, while his eyes remained on me, knowing that as ever he'd made a deep impression.

  Eddgar was expelled the next day, April 30. More than three-quarters of the faculty voted in favor. Jeering members of One Hundred Flowers were dragged off by Damon's finest as they stood with placards, heckling the president of the university when he returned home from the meeting. Eddgar addressed the cameras of virtually every California television station. Freedom of speech and thought, he said - the supposed cardinal values of university life - had been exposed, he said, as a fiction, a sham, a quilted coverlet masking the iron face of political rigor and reactionary values.

  In spite of the high drama, Eddgar's story did not remain at the top of the news. By 11 p.m., when Michael and I took our places in the bedroom where I'd moved the TV set in deference to Nile's sleep, the lead item was Richard Nixon's address to the nation earlier in the evening. I had read that the speech was coming, but like everyone else never anticipated the content. Now Nixon announced he was sending U S soldiers into the Cambodian Fish Hook to rout out North Vietnamese supplies and troops, and also bombing their supply routes in Laos. The screen filled with Nixon's shadowy, humorless mug as the President, in one of his Orwellian fabrications, assured the nation that the war was not expanding.

  'Can you believe this?' I asked Michael, who replied with a limp shrug. The newsreader ran on to other matters - Eddgar's expulsion; the news that the judge at the Kopechne inquest had questioned Edward Kennedy's veracity; suspicion that Juanita Rice and her captors had robbed another bank in West LA. Michael eventually slipped out, saying he was sleepy, while I continued fulminating. After all Nixon's talk about how the war was winding down, he was invading another nation. After all the protests, the marches, the mobilized dissent - after all my pain -Nixon was still in the spell of the generals and his ingrained paranoia. He was refusing to bow to the Commies as always, struggling to win a war he could only lose, killing young men for the ego and profit of old ones, and proving, as if he meant to, the correctness of those who had contended all along that only far more dramatic measures would breed change.

  Within the hour, I heard voices blaring behind the apartment. Out on Campus Boul, protesters had commandeered the microphone at a drive-thru fast-food restaurant and were exclaiming, in the amplified voice, "Dick Nixon! Dick Nixon!' Another group was in the middle of the street, bringing traffic to a skidding halt and chorusing back something similar about Spiro Agnew. I hung through the open window. At top volume, I screamed right along - Dick Nixon - yelling until Nile woke and my throat felt so raw I imagined it might be bloody.

  *

  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 t
he 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 you 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. Go
ing 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?'