The Laws of our Fathers

STOP NIXON'S WAR MACHINE

Ohio State Laos New Haven Cambodia Vietnam Nationwide Student Strike Strike before it's too late! Strike for knowledge! Strike for sanity! Strike for yourself! Strike for peace! Strike! Strike!!! STRIKE!!!

In the main quad, an open-mike speechathon was underway, one antiwar speaker after another, faculty and students reviling Richard Nixon to the celebration of enormous applause. Huge rock amps boomed out the message, which resounded off the buildings, echoing over a huge crowd. 'We have declared an end to business as usual,' a woolly-looking prof was shouting, 'an end to standing by while our leaders continue this despicable war.' He was an officer of the Faculty Senate, one of the guys who'd been happy two nights ago about booting Eddgar. He cried out for peace and the crowd shouted back to him. 'The whole world is watching!' they chorused spontaneously at the end of his address. For a moment I let myself believe it. I fondled my passion and my hope like a precious toy – I clutched them, embraced them – then looked at my watch and put them all aside. I had only forty minutes left.

Africa House was located in one of the old red-brick dorms. The Afro-American students, as they recently had begun calling themselves, had swapped and cajoled and intimidated their way into a block of thirty rooms. Residency in Africa House was limited solely to members of the Negro race. It was intended as a separate paradise where everybody wore dashikis and called each other 'brother' and could debate issues of politics and culture of unique concern to the residents. Whenever I passed by, the music blaring from the windows was great – Miriam Makeba, Junior Walker, and the Miracles – the sound track of my high-school years. The campus daily carried competing editorials regularly, debating whether this kind of separation was desirable. Having accepted from an early age that there was no more stupid way to judge a human than by skin color, I regarded the formation of Africa House as irrational and deeply destructive. But its existence was by now an accepted fact. A portrait of Malcolm X in Day-Glo shades had been painted on the doorway, over which the Ghanaian flag fluttered. Here too the strike banners hung from the windows, in an unexpected showing of solidarity.

In the corridor, a soul sister in shades and a high natural took her time when I asked for Hobie Tuttle. She was reading Cane at an old school desk, hauled in from a classroom. There were slogans from Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr, inscribed on the walls.

'Who you?'

I told her. Friend. Roommate. 'You a narc?'

'You want to search me, search me.' I lifted my hands from my sides.

The room where I found Hobie about ten minutes later was tiled entirely in black and white – large squares, eighteen inches on a side. They covered not only the floor but the walls and ceilings as well. The first impression was of looking into a kaleidoscope. When I pushed open the door, Hobie sat across the room, slumped in a comer, beside a simple dresser of university issue which had been refinished in dull black contact paper. He was wearing a long leather coat. My initial thought was that he was sick or drunk, but he smiled with enough sureness that I knew he had his bearings. There was a large silver pistol on the tile beside him, a few inches from his hand. I had never seen a gun before in my life, except in the holster of a cop, and I stared at it for quite some time.

'You gonna shoot me?'

He issued a wan smile and motioned me inside. I lifted a hand to the walls. 'Psychedelic' 'It works.'

'If you passed through the looking glass. I got night sweats and it's 4:15. How you hanging, dude?'

'Feelin groovy,' he answered. He looked bad. Through his color, his nose was reddened at the bridge and on the nostrils. His scruple against coke appeared to have eroded at a time of distress. He told me this was once Cleveland's pad, one of his locations.

'Cleveland's in pretty deep, huh?'

'Oh, you know, man. The pigs planted that shit. You know that. Pigs just can't handle this nasty colored boy in law school.' That was the story the Panthers had put out. Whoever had replaced Eldridge Cleaver as Minister of Information had been on the radio calling Cleveland's arrest a setup. But we'd all heard this tune too many times now. Between Hobie and me the gloom of all our differences settled in his spirited rendition of this sad little lie. 'I'm heading to Canada,' I told him.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Old Loopy Lucy Loo says she's gonna truck on with you.'

'That's what she tells me. She needs to get away. She's been doing this heartbreak thing?' 'That's how it is?' Hobie said.

'That's how it is,' I answered. 'So if you hear the Mounties are saying "Groovy" instead of "We always get our man," you'll know why.' I wanted badly to amuse him. I wanted him to be what he had always been – my friend. He smiled somewhat. ‘I was kind of hoping you'd have come around to say farewell.'

'Well, you know how it is, man. I got a few serious problems here. Kind of layin low.'

'Somebody looking for you?'

'Could be yes. Sort of hoping no.' I wasn't sure how much I could ask. With his unfaltering ear for language, Hobie had mastered the urban accent that had never been his. His father, I knew, would slap him if he heard him talking like that. That was the point, I guess. Hobie'd taken everything his father had wanted him to care about and put it in another generation's wrapper. Two thousand miles away, removed from the vast penumbra of Gurney's influence, he was going about the business of being a man on his own terms. As was so often the case with Hobie, I found no comfort in any comparisons to myself.

From far away on the quad, a cheer went up. The strikers were making noise. Hobie, with weary immobility, looked back toward the window, where a black shade was drawn, and made an elderly sound.

'These kids got Tricky in a tight spot, man. He just gone have to stop that war, or else they ain't never gonna go back to school.' Hobie was tickled by the thought.

'They're doing what they can, Hobie.'

He lifted a hand. He didn't really care. We waited.

'We talking ARC?' I asked. 'Is that your problem?'

He didn't stir, as he mulled answering. ‘I didn't do shit but what you know about, if that's what you're asking. Then again, seems as how that may be enough. Been hearin about a fingerprint on that piece of a can they picked up.'

'Oh, Hobie. Jesus Christ.' After the first wave of distress, I realized this was what June must have meant.

‘I get all this from one of Cleveland's fucked-up comrades. These dudes, you know, could just be blowin my mind. On the other hand' – Hobie actually lifted the gun and put it to his temple – 'sucker might come in handy.' He smiled. 'Or shoot the pig comes through the door for me.' Very briefly, he pointed the pistol in my direction.

'Let's do a retake on that one.'

Hobie shrugged. I could be right about that.

'So what's your bad dream here?' I asked. 'Is Cleveland talking? Is that it?' If Cleveland was strung out, he would be easy to roll. He might even have turned over by now, although the Eddgars claimed that Cleveland's weekend visitors had bucked him up. Hobie denied there was any cause for concern.

'Cleveland, man – Cleveland's the baddest mother ever shit between two shoes.'

'So he's not talking?'

'He ain talkin, less he wants to talk. You know, maybe he said some things. Maybe he's tryin to catch a few fools' attention.' I could hear in the steady drumbeat with which these assurances rolled that Hobie had uttered them often in the last few days. 'See, man, this is just, you know, a little internal struggle. Eldridge and Huey, man – Huey is kind of a strange motherfucker. Can be very abstract about stuff. Very cold. He's gone be comin out any day now. Cleveland was more in with Eldridge and them. Now Huey's saying, you know, like peddling dope and all, that isn't any kind of revolutionary act. You know? And all the fucker's really meanin is that the party didn't get a righteous enough piece.'

I nodded.

'So you know, Cleveland, man, he's feelin a distinct lack of solidarity. I mean there're 20,000 people in the streets of New Haven for Bobby and back here nobody can't even be bothered to throw Cleveland's bail. Maybe the brother said something to attract some attention. But that's dialogue, man. Dialectics. This is an ideological debate, you know? Stalin and Lenin.'

'And which one's going to tell on you, Hobie? Stalin or Lenin?'

He gave me a sick smile to show he did not enjoy being mocked. He never had.

'If Cleveland turns, that's your ass, right?'

'Cleveland ain turnin. Not on no brothers. That's for sure.' I knew he was persuading himself. But even with what he admitted – that Cleveland might give up a few ofays – I could see what worried the Eddgars.

'You could turn first, Hobe. You know, you didn't do anything. You could explain.'

'Ain no snitch.' He lowered his voice. He gestured with the gun. 'They-all'd kill my ass anyway.' That was what Bobby was on trial for in New Haven – killing an informer.

I could have chided Hobie, pointed out what a mess he'd made for himself, but today it would have been hypocritical. If I told him what I was doing with the Eddgars, there'd be no end to the names he'd call me. We'd both been overcome by something that still seemed to me to have started out so right. It was like a party where the good times – the music, the dancing, the girls, the excitement – had unaccountably led to disaster. I felt sorry for us both.

'For your information, the Eddgars seem to have a plan for Cleveland's bail. So maybe you can holster your weapon. He should be on the street soon.'

'The Eddgars,' said Hobie. 'Fuck. Ain nothing come free with them.'

'But you'll be okay then, right?'

He moved his shoulders in the same inconclusive way he'd done a number of times already. He didn't really know. It might be better. A moment passed.

'Are you scared?' I asked him.

He considered that, the sorrowful brown eyes dead still on me. The Panthers didn't know fear.

'This here, man, is Vietnam. It's like a bad trip wide awake, and you ain't got that little edge to hold to, tellin yourself that it's bound to wear off. I haven't slept but an hour, two hours in two days. The wrong dude comes through that door? "These are the days of our lives, bubba." '

'So get the hell out of here. Put on your PF Flyers and jump higher and run faster than anybody else. Come to Canada. How about that? Hope and Crosby do another road movie?'

A familiar whimsy shot through his face, then wore away. He shook his head no, decisively.

'I'm cool here. Bros be lookin out for me.'

When I left, he roused himself and, after an instant of deliberation in which he pretended to be staggering around, raised his arms and returned my embrace. He kept the pistol in his hand for the instant we were connected. When I turned for the door, he spoke a few words to me in French, one of his typically stylish gestures, although he knew it was a language I didn't speak. I caught the words 'mon ami.' I was sure it was a movie line, but I couldn't recall the picture.

When I got back to the Campus Travel Motel, Eddgar was there. I had taken the key, and when I came in I had an odd sense I was intruding on some intimacy, although there was nothing lewd about the pose in which I found June and him. They were seated on the facing sides of the twin beds, their heads drawn close. Clearly they'd been whispering, defeating some unknown surveillant, controlling the random element. As I entered, Eddgar's face shot around, the intense blue eyes riveted, as always, by anger and suspicion.

'My Lord, Seth. We've been sitting here hoping like hell, just hoping they didn't run into you.' 'Who's that?'

Eddgar looked at June. From the thick smell of her cigarettes and the butts in the ashtray I could see they had been talking quite some time – probably as long as I'd been gone.

'Apparently we've had visitors at the apartment building, asking questions,' she said.

What kind of questions? I asked.

'I didn't see them,' Eddgar said. 'Michael talked to them. I spoke to him over the phone. He said they were asking about you: How long since you were last seen? Who was with you then? Any signs of struggle, unusual sounds last night?'

'Bullshit,' I said.

'I wish it were,' said Eddgar.

'What did he tell them?'

'Nothing,' said Eddgar. 'He didn't know anything. He was on his way to look over his lab, so he didn't have time. You know how hard it is to get a word out of him normally. But it's damn clear to me they thought you'd been kidnapped.'

'God. Who? Who was it?'

'Michael said they showed him credentials.' Eddgar looked briefly to June, before me. 'It was the FBI,' he said.