The Laws of our Fathers

APRIL 1970

Seth

Eddgar's expulsion hearings before the university Senate commenced in the third week of April. Sessions ran from 4:00 in the afternoon to 10:00 at night, so faculty members could attend without interrupting their classes. After each evening's adjournment, the Eddgars and their lawyers met for a lengthy planning session, arguing about strategy, gathering information about coming witnesses. Eddgar and June seldom arrived home before 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, only a couple of hours before I had to get up to begin distributing After Dark to the coin boxes. As a result, I began putting Nile to bed on the living-room sofa in my apartment. Roiled up by my imminent flight to Canada and my breakup with Sonny, I was not sleeping soundly and usually heard one of his parents steal in to retrieve him.

My life in those weeks felt dismal, stillborn, lost. I could not figure out why I had gone on working, why I had not left yet, except that it didn't seem I could take any substantial step in such a shattered state. My induction remained a couple of weeks off, on May 4. Michael, Nile, and I continued to eat dinner each night, but they were sorry gatherings, silent except for the TV which Nile watched. I felt Sonny's absence acutely, and Michael, even for Michael, was remote. He claimed his lab was preoccupying him, but I sensed his affair with June had moved to a critical new stage. Those days each of them seemed tense in the other's presence.

After Nile was asleep, I would lie on the mattress on our bedroom floor – where I now slept alone – my transistor clutched to my ear as I listened to the hearing sessions being broadcast on campus radio at Eddgar's demand. It reminded me of when I was seven or eight and used to lie beneath the blankets at home with the volume on my radio reduced to a secretive hush, listening to the Trappers' baseball games in what I now unexpectedly regarded as happier times.

The case against Eddgar depended principally on evidence gathered by the campus police. For all the talk of snitches, none had come forward. Nor did they appear to be needed. The cops had photographs. They showed the PLP members in their gas masks. And in the picture that became more or less the signature of the case, the mystery woman, the girl who'd shrieked and disappeared, was portrayed emerging from the crowd. One moment, she was unmarked. Then her hand was at her face. Streaks of dark blood were shown running from her crown, but, said the faculty prosecutor, something was dropping from her hand. A vial? She was identified from mug shots as Laura Lancey, an employee at Bayside Packers, the canning plant where June worked. As Eddgar's lawyers pointed out, none of this proved she was not beaten; none of this implicated Eddgar, even if it was assumed that Eddgar was acquainted with the young woman, which he emphatically denied. But the sequence of photos – the university produced the numbered contact sheets – showed Eddgar looking twice across his right shoulder, behind himself to the area of the broad pea-gravel plaza where Laura Lancey eventually emerged. As if he knew something was going to happen there. Eddgar's lawyers claimed the negatives had been reversed.

In the cafe discussions on Campus Boul, there were few testimonials to Eddgar's character. No one supposed he was above violence or lying about it afterwards. He was, after all, a revolutionary, dedicated to undermining bourgeois institutions. But if the university was held to the standards of the system it wanted to defend, its evidence seemed flimsy. Eddgar's speech was just that, a speech. The faculty prosecutor tried to establish that Eddgar had been on campus, aiding the rioters. Two cops claimed they had glimpsed Eddgar, supposedly helping the fellow who tumbled from the police-station roof, but they admitted being several hundred feet away at the time. The police had also retrieved a shirt from a trash container on campus. It had a One Hundred Flowers armband tied on one sleeve and the pointillistic remnants of what the prosecutor claimed were Eddgar's initials printed in the collar years before when he still sent his shirts to the Chinese laundry. The ironies of this bit of evidence were not lost on anyone.

I knew Eddgar was guilty. Until the hearing, I'd never bothered squarely facing that, but the recognition settled on me with barely a ripple of surprise. But I found myself vaguely hopeful that he would get off anyway, even though I still wasn't sure I was on his side. In my present mood, though, I was sympathetic to anybody forced to confront harsh authority.

Over the months, Nile and I had found our own rhythm. Sometimes we drew on the sidewalk with chalk, sometimes he let me play a snarling man who could not reach him when he threw things down at me from the treehouse. He still preferred to watch TV in my apartment, but he favored me with questions now and then, provoked by what he was seeing. Why was the boy mad at the girl on account of the other girl? Sometimes he called on me to confirm the lessons his father relentlessly taught him.

'Commercials are just big lies, right?' 'A lot of them.'

'They just want you to buy stuff. They're just greedy, right?'

'Maybe they think what they're selling will help you, man.'

'They're greedy,' Nile repeated. Greed was a sin that Eddgar, especially, furiously denounced. 'They don't want to help the peoples. They don't care about the peoples.' His eyes lit in space, fixing on some troubled judgment about the world and, perhaps, himself.

Despite June's persistent efforts to shelter him, Eddgar's expulsion hearings inevitably took a toll on Nile as well.

'We're moving,' Nile told me one night in April. 'Did you know we're getting another house somewhere else?'

I tried to be encouraging and suggested that might not be the case.

'June says.' His head bobbed emphatically. 'Are you getting another house with us?'

At June's insistence, I made only the vaguest references to my plans. She believed he couldn't handle my departure, particularly with their own situation so unsettled, a judgment that seemed well supported by Nile's surprisingly morose response when Sonny had moved out. Sonny had spent time with Nile only at meals, but she was always kind to him and from the start she had been far better attuned to his moods than I was. Back in the winter, I'd complained about the way Nile seemed to disappear into the TV, immune to any other distraction.

'Don't you see he's depressed?' she had answered. She was seated, legs akimbo, on our bed, surrounded by books like tribute.

'Depressed? He's a kid. What's he got to be depressed about?'

'Weren't you depressed as a child? Isn't that what you're always talking about?'

'I was terrified, man. I'm not sure that's depressed. Why? Were you depressed?'

She shrugged and turned a page, intent. But some impulse escaped her.

‘I mean, baby,' she said, 'you have to look at that house. Think what that's like: to be the child of a revolutionary, someone who's always spouting off about these visions of what's bigger and more important than anything or anyone, including you.'

'You mean Nile's got like sibling rivalry with Chairman Mao?' I was, as usual, greatly entertained by myself and could not understand Sonny's sizzling, vexed expression, or why she turned back to her books so bitterly.

Yet she was right. Nile was one of those kids for whom growing up just seemed to be hard. He was always in scrapes of one kind or another at school and often perceived himself as the victim of terrible physical ailments. Any cut, no matter how microscopic, inspired prolonged weeping. He sometimes wore as many as six adhesive strips on his limbs.

One night in the fall, when I was alone with him, I had heard Nile padding to the John. I was startled because he had never gotten up before. He had stripped off his clothes and stood shivering. He wore only a huge diaper which lapped gigantically around him.

'I'm wet,' he said, hardly a necessary announcement. The smell was strong. I washed him, as he quivered, his eyes, dark like his mother's, heavy with sleep.

'Tell my mom I go'd,' he said.

During the hearings, I covered my sofa in a plastic sheet and assured Nile that I was unconcerned about accidents. With my departure at hand, I didn't care if the place reeked. Throughout the months June had never addressed the subject with me. She never told me what to do to help, or confessed that this was why she'd insisted Nile sleep in his own bed. It was one more secret of their household, which, like the rest of what I knew, I was expected to maintain in silence.

The night Eddgar finished his testimony, he showed up to collect Nile. I had heard every word on the campus radio and thought he had done a fine job in his own behalf. He denied any intention of inciting to riot, said he'd never met Laura Lancey, and claimed he had returned to his apartment as soon as the demonstration at the ARC turned to violence. He had no role, he said, in the ensuing melee on campus. He sounded equable, the soul of reason. I suspected that much of what he said was true – that he had been careful never to meet Laura Lancey. But his voice did not betray him in any way, even in the moments that I knew he was uttering unvarnished lies. On cross-examination the prosecutor contented himself with the text of Eddgar's many classroom lectures and public speeches.

'In addressing a group, have you ever repeated the saying "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"?'

'Of course, I have. That's a matter of theory.'

'You have called for armed struggle, for violence?'

'At the proper time.'

'And who is it who decides the time, Dr Eddgar?'

The defense lawyer objected, and eventually the senate president cut off questioning.

I told him now I thought it had gone well.

'To no avail,' he answered. 'The end is a foregone conclusion. I must admit that was always one of my favorite theological puzzles. Why did Jesus say what he did on the cross? You know the part I'm referring to? About his father forsaking him? Hadn't the poor fool known what was coming? Did his father send him down here with no warning? What kind of relationship did they have, any old way?' He laughed in his usual quiet fashion when something amused him alone.

I asked about the closing arguments, scheduled for tomorrow, but Eddgar appeared uninterested. His eyes fell to the two cardboard boxes of Sonny's belongings she'd left behind. I'm sure he assumed they were mine.

'When will you go?' he asked.

'Next week.' This was the second week in a row that I'd said that. At times, I feared I would never propel myself, that I'd wait until some ugly vortex – the FBI or secret military dragoons sucked me down to a blackish fate. For the moment, though, I used the hearings as my excuse. I would go as soon as the Eddgars were settled again.

'And your parents – are they still hounding you?' he asked.

'Relentlessly.' My mother had taken money – her own funds, her knipple, saved out of the household money – and bought an open ticket to Vancouver. My father said she had also packed a suitcase. There was only one in the house I knew of, a brown lacquered valise hard as an insect shell, and I imagined it now poised by the front door.

'Perhaps you should rethink being kidnapped.'

We laughed. I had, at moments, returned to the idea. It gave me a vicious thrill to imagine my father pinioned that way -between his child and his money. An antique theme. Midas came to mind, although I tended to think more about Jack Benny, one of my father's favorites, and his famous bit where a robber with a gun and a mask accosts Jack.

'Your money or your life,' the robber demands, and Jack, after a splendid long take, answers, 'I'm thinking, I'm thinking.'

Driving my delivery route, turning things over obsessively, like rolling dice, I thought I could measure the true probabilities. Each time, I pushed my imagination further along the train of likely events. My father was too shrewd not to sense the ruse. Of course. He'd see it was far too convenient. Far too coincidental. But my mother would never rouse herself to disbelief – no matter how unlikely the threat to my well-being. She would cry. She would pull on the sleeves of her dress, fumble with her hands, follow him about, crying all the time, begging him in German, shrieking and beleaguering him. He would give in. He would part with the money, suspecting all along that I had exacted a price to leave him in peace.

'It's like I said a while ago: he'd pay in the end and I'd be no better off than I was to start. It's not really workable.'

'Oh, there's always a way. It's only details,' Eddgar added, as if particulars were not the stuff of life.

I was seated in the living-room armchair, picking at the threadbare patch where the ticking showed through.

'You don't honestly think I should do this, man, do you?'

'Seth, what I think you should do is join the armed struggle. But I'm not so foolish as to believe that's likely to occur right now.' He'd picked up Nile's stuffed animal and his blanket and he put them down now on the sofa, where the boy still slept, oblivious to our hushed conversation. 'May I tell you a story? This is the worst story I know. The worst. I hate even to think about it. But I have a point to make.'

He sat down on a milk crate we used as a coffee table and paused to hike each of his pants legs, his preparations deepening the mood.

'When I was fourteen years old,' Eddgar said, 'I went with my father to the Overlook Valley Hunt Club. What it is in the life of the South – what it is that when there are so many as six prosperous white families in a 50-square-mile region they will organize themselves in either a hunt club or a country club or some similar pastoral enterprise, what it is I have never fully explained to myself, but my father, like his father, was a member of this club, and on Saturday afternoons, as his week was at an end and he prepared himself for our Sabbath on Sunday, he would adjourn to this club and drink Tennessee whiskey until the sun had set and my father was drunk as a lord. I was terribly embarrassed to see my father in that condition – he took a high red color, bright as a geranium, and it was also an unscrupled breach of his own religious principles for which he never made one word of apology. I hated to go with him, but I was raised in the kind of family where you simply said, "Yes, Daddy," when something was required and so I went along on many a Saturday, becoming, I suppose, educated in a tradition which I'm sure he expected me to take up as my own, listenin to large men with the characteristic names – Bear and Dog Head and Billy Ray – drinking bourbon with mint and sugar water, telling about critters they had shot and women they had known. All right?' he asked.

With this story, Eddgar was at home – in every sense. His lexicon had changed and his accent deepened. He had told the tale many times, I knew, practiced it, but Eddgar held me as he always did. I nodded quickly for him to go on.

'Well, the tiny little town of Overlook was near the club and you had to drive directly through it to get back to my father's plantation. It was like most little Southern towns: white and colored patches separated by the railroad tracks; not so much as a streetlight yet because we hadn't gotten Rural Electrification. And one evening when my father had drunk himself silly, turned red as those dirt roads, just absolutely radiating the heat of drink, he came flyin round the corner and plowed smack into the front of some old shivering heap that was stopped politely at a sign there in the colored section. I must say this wreck shook up both my daddy and me. He bounced his head against the windshield and took a good lick there, and began spouting a skinny little stream of blood that ran down into his eyes, but finally we collected ourselves and looked out to see some poor Negro man climbing out the door of his car, a rural fellow in a checkered shirt and soiled overalls, who considered the mess that had been made of his Ford. Its entire front end was stove in, completely limp and useless, except for this little white-hot hiss of steam shooting out like some starving cousin of Old Faithful.

'Now by whatever principle of misfortune that was then operating in Overlook, there was not another witness on that street, not another soul besides this man and my daddy and me who'd seen my father come tearing round that corner, as if the devil himself were in pursuit. And my father got out of his car and he came up to this man – not someone I knew, just some poor terrified black fellow – and my father looked at him and he pointed to his head and he said, "Nigger, you see what you done? Now you got one minute to get some of those other boys out here and get this car of your'n outta my way, or I'm gonna be callin Bill Clayburgh and I'm gonna have him run you in."

'Well, I suppose I should have been used to that. I can't tell you how my father treated the sharecroppers. When I was a boy, there was one fellow who had accidentally killed a cow, and my father and Billy Clayburgh, the sheriff, and some other white men hog-tied that fellow and held him under the river until he admitted killing that cow and agreed to let the price of that cow be taken out of the pitiful sum that was called his wages. But this wasn't the plantation, this was town, where my father was, as a general matter, better behaved. But I guess his true colors, so to speak, were showing. And he looked that poor man up and down, up and down, that poor black man who stood there wondering, Can this really be happening, can this white man just shoot around a corner, drunk enough that you can smell it standing five foot away, and make a total wreck out of my car that I worked so hard for and give me not a penny's recompense? Can he do that, or is there some small particle of goodness in this world that will prevent that? And then he looked past my father and caught sight of me in the front seat. His eyes loitered on mine. It wasn't a plaintive look, cause this man knew better than that and he was surely too proud to beg. He just looked and kind of asked me in a way, You too? You gonna do this too? Is this here going on and on? I knew what he wanted and so did my daddy, and he just said, "Don't you look at him, he seen the same as I have." And I said not a word.

'Well, that fellow didn't have any choice then and soon enough the man did what my daddy told him. He went in and out of some of the little houses, with their tarpaper sides, and collected some of his kin, some friends from out of a store up on the next corner, and by and by they came out and pushed the car out of the way and we left there. And my father, he wasn't done, he rolled his window down and said, "Don't you niggers let this happen again neither."

'And I say this is the worst story I know, because I just watched. I was fourteen years old. But I knew right from wrong. I knew brute authority from justice. And I spoke not a word. Not because my heart didn't ache to do it. But because I lacked the courage.

I hadn't planned my escape well enough in my mind. I hadn't yet prepared the path to my own freedom. Oh, I wept my eyes out that night and the nights following. And my resolve grew. And I swore to myself that whatever happened, I would never tie my tongue out of fear of my father or anyone else who was doing what I knew to be plain wickedness. In the years since, I have often heard my father say he raised his worst enemy in his own home, and I take pleasure when I hear him saying that. Because however else I judge myself, I think at least I've kept my word.'

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 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 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. 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.

'What a horrible day,' he said. It occurred to me that he must have been sitting in that spot for hours. I'd always understood that Michael viewed himself as a neutralist. He cared for Nile; he adored physics. I had no doubt he was in love with June. In all of this, he belonged to a higher, more ephemeral realm, one where a simple purity of feeling was acceptable. Now he'd been injected, against his will, into the rough-hewn world of politics. 1 felt, of course, enormous kinship for him, as another soul mauled by love.

'You want to talk about it?' I asked.

He shook his head no. Throughout the day, I had pondered how much June was admitting when she told me Michael felt betrayed. I had been sure just a moment before that she was telling me Eddgar and she were blameless. But as I turned over June's spare remarks, trying to collect their logic, I'd seen that as usual there'd been more said than I'd recognized. Near midnight she'd left Eddgar's meeting to be with Michael. That had to have been by design, by prearrangement. And as a result, he was out of the labs, otherwise occupied at the moment of impact. Neither I – nor he – could presume that was accidental. Standing in his bare apartment, I gave him what comfort I could.

'Look, I mean, thinking about it-' I lowered my voice. 'She protected you, man,' I said. 'She did protect you.'

He planted the heel of his palm squarely in the middle of his face and began to cry again. The physicist who had been injured was named Patrick Langlois – a Quebecer. He had lost almost all of his right hand. His thumb remained, some ghoulish vestige attached to a fragment of his arm. Even the dry descriptions on the news had been sickening. Michael must have known him well.

From Lucy's remarks, I took it that Michael spoke to June of love, commitment, life together. Yet in imagining their relations, I doubted June was interested in any of that. She was merely seeking some fugitive reprieve in a region of pure feeling, of silence, beyond the territory of doctrine. And a part of Michael must have accepted those terms, even welcomed them. That was his truest dwelling place anyhow. But now he was left to wonder about motivations. What idle comments of his had been passed back through One Hundred Flowers to the slick commandos who brought their plastique and detonators in the dark? What if he hadn't gotten June's message? What if he'd decided to work late, enjoying, as he often did, the hours when he had the vast laboratory to himself? He had to wonder about Eddgar as well. Was he accomplishing revolution or some blow against his wife's lover? Nonetheless, I could guess what the worst part was for him. That June knew. Knew and had bowed to Eddgar's will. In the most telling, the most graphic way, she had demonstrated to everyone her ultimate loyalties. Whatever hopes June had raised in Michael, she could not have more clearly chosen Eddgar over him. She had spoken advisedly. He felt betrayed.

'Dinner, or you want to skip it?'

'Skip it,' he answered.

'Look, I'm next door if you just want to hang out, man.'

As it happened, June asked if I'd mind Nile while Eddgar and she took a ride. That meant they would talk in the safety of the car, circling the streets for hours, checking the rearview and hatching plans. Nile and I played War and Crazy 8s most of the night.

'Where'd the pigs take Eddgar?' Nile asked. 'To the station.' We went over it again and again. 'But they don't arreck children, do they?' 'Absolutely not. Nobody can arrest a child. And Eddgar's fine. Isn't he fine?'

'He's mad. Cause the judge said he could go. When I'm growed up I'm going to be a police.' 'You are?'

'Then I can arreck the right people.'

'Look, Eddgar's okay. He's fine, right? Doesn't he seem fine?'

‘I wouldn't arreck Eddgar!' Nile was instantly overcome with tears. The mere thought of Eddgar often seemed to upset Nile. There was never a spanking; Eddgar seldom yelled. But as a father, he could not keep from being himself, always preaching, teaching, always correcting Nile, moving on to the next lesson as soon as the last one was acknowledged.

At Christmas, I had witnessed an awful scene when Eddgar had attempted to convince Nile to donate one of his few toys, a stuffed pig, to a poor people's collective in East Oakland. The pig was soiled and pilled, not recognizable as much more than an oblong lump the color of your gums, and Nile seldom looked at it now that he had Babu, his handsome stuffed bear, with its pelt of shiny synthetic fur. But when Eddgar explained his plans for the pig, Nile held fast to it, wailing, while Eddgar in his tireless intent way held on too, reasoning implacably with his son about other children who had no toys at all.

‘I want it,' Nile replied. 'I want it.' Nile hauled on the pig, and lay back. Finally, with a small pop and a scatter in the sunlight of some dusty filament, the pig suffered the amputation of a leg. Eddgar considered this at length. Eventually, he handed the bigger piece to Nile, then went to the boy's room and removed Babu.

Eddgar held the bear far overhead, well out of reach, as he headed to the door.

'This is what the poor children are getting now,' Eddgar announced, his long forehead knotted by a fury that I had seldom witnessed, even when he was inciting on campus. Nile hadn't dared to get back to his feet. He made no sound at all until his father was gone out the door, at which point the boy wailed unbearably. Decimated herself, June fell to her knees and held him in her arms, pieta-like, the two of them crippled by grief.

Now, with his sudden tears about Eddgar, Nile crawled into my arms. He was usually inconsolable – likely to throw tantrums and shirk a comforting hand. Instead, he accepted my embrace and clung. He would not climb down and fell off to sleep. For reasons beyond explaining, it touched me terribly that amid all my troubles – fears for my future, guilt about Hobie, my heartbreak over Sonny – Nile had found this moment to finally regard me with trust. In the dark, I curled myself about the small body, holding his fingers, rough with grime, while I absorbed the fullness of my desire to protect him and the whispered promise of a young life.

Women came and went in my dreams, vague figures with whom I became enmeshed, and whose yearnings I somehow could not tell from my own. I was in the midst of some vivid tableau in which one of us was being desperately pursued, but I could not tell who was following whom. I opened my eyes and June Eddgar sat on my bed. Her hand was on my chest, softly circling, prodding.

'Are you awake?' she whispered. 'Seth?' I knew this was not the first time she had said my name.

I sat up. I slept nude and I gathered the sheet, aware suddenly of the stiffness below of a urinary erection. Even when I wakened, June remained comfortably beside me.

I asked where Nile was.

'Upstairs. I took him up hours ago. I've just been lying awake, pondering something. I have to talk to you, Seth. I want you to hear me out.' She hiked herself up on the bed and came just a smidgen closer. She wore a cotton night shift and the loose weight of her breasts trembled when she moved. 'We need money,' she said. 'Real money.'

I reached beside the bedside for the lamp, careful to hold the sheet and conscious that I'd probably exposed my backside anyway. June sat, unblinking, her hair loose as it had been the day I saw her at Michael's. Her tongue briefly touched her lips while she waited for me to shield my eyes and let the pain of dilation pass. Somehow it struck me that all the years she – any child – spent looking in a mirror, wondering what she would look like as an adult, at her prime – that was how June looked now. Her pretty face had the substance of maturity, the weight of intelligence and purpose. I looked at her as a human being who, unlike me, had finished the journey to whatever it was she was to become. I had no doubt she shared that judgment.

'This money is important,' she said. 'Very important. We have to get Cleveland out. Soon.'

'Is this the bomb?'

'Seth,' she said severely. It was the same tone that escaped her against her will now and again when she was scolding Nile. She took a moment to counsel with herself. 'There are rumors – you understand, this may all be counter-intelligence by the Damon pigs, everything I'm saying may be, so please bear that in mind – but we've heard rumors that Cleveland is talking. That he's started giving them little things, hoping to get his bond reduced. I don't believe it. But with Eldridge in Algeria there have been a lot of rifts within the Panthers. A lot of internal commotion. And we think it's possible. We've sent his mother to see him. And a lawyer. He's going to have plenty of folks at visitors' hours all weekend. But it's best for all concerned to get him out as soon as possible. Certainly by next week. We have to bail him and get him out of their hands, before he's blabbing his fool head off. Do you hear me?'

'Okay.'

'There are many people who have an enormous amount at stake. Not only our people. All right? There are many people, people who haven't really – One of your good friends.'

My heart constricted again into a tiny knot at the thought of Hobie.

'Seth, there's no use explaining. No point and no good use of it. But things will work out. I'm sure they will work out. If we can get this money.'

I asked how much.

'Thousands. Ten thousand minimum. Fifteen would be better.' She measured my astonishment. 'Now listen.' She sat forward and smoothed her hand again across my chest to subdue me. The confident way she touched me lit, not wholly to my liking, the spark of some unruly thrill. 'Now hear me out. I've been thinking. And it's a question, I suppose – It's two birds with one stone. I wondered if you would possibly reconsider this plan, this idea we discussed.'

She waited until I was the first to speak the word. 'Kidnapping?' She nodded only once, as if there was a caution against speech. 'Jesus,' I said.

'It seems to make so much sense from your side.'

'I know, but-' The thought of scamming my father, from which I naturally recoiled, also seemed, in some moods, to imbue me momentarily with a wild lightheartedness. There was no doubt he deserved as much. Nonetheless, I shook my head. ‘I can't torture them. Especially not my mother.'

'I think we can work out what concerns you, I truly do. If you felt satisfied that could be avoided -1 know how odd this is,' she said, 'but it seems clear you're going to have to do something drastic. You only have a couple of days.' The fourth of May, when I was scheduled for induction, was Monday. 'If they knew you were safe, Seth, your well-being was assured, but they had to leave you be, let you go, that would be the best for you now, wouldn't it? Am I right about that?'

I didn't answer, fearful of what I was getting myself into.

'Will you think about this? Please? But there isn't a lot of time.' 'I understand. I have to get my head around this one.' We looked at each other.

'I mean,' I said, 'you guys. I mean, Eddgar and you.' I swallowed. 'And Nile. I mean, you're all in trouble now. Right? Real trouble?'

'Seth-' She stopped. 'If Cleveland-' She stopped again. 'Right,' she said. 'Real trouble.' She looked into my eyes with purpose. I noticed only now that she had gripped me by both shoulders. There were many young men in June Eddgar's life. I knew that then. She might as well have said it. I had no idea what difference it made; nothing was going to happen between us. But some bond was forged nonetheless, if only because a fragment of me was briefly waked to the reality that other women besides Sonny existed. June padded out, barefoot, her shift clinging to her as she departed, having made a moment when, improbably, desire seemed to be the only real thing in the world.