"We got to get out of here," muttered one of Wyn's students.
"May they leave?" she asked the policeman quickly.
"What about you?" one student, astonishingly enough, asked her.
"I'll be fine. And well have class next week. I'll post a . . ."
"Outtahere!" the policeman jerked his chin. The girls in their midst, they fled.
The students on the green screamed down the negotiator, tried to rush the cops, and found themselves pushed back, back toward electrified barriers set up on two sides of the square.
Wyn saw her students caught up and engulfed. "No!" She cried, "No! Help them!" A nightstick came down on the head of the boy with whom she had spoken Spanish with. He toppled, blood pouring from his nose.
Wyn grabbed the policeman's arm. It was like grasping an industrial robot. "You promised they'd be safe! Go help them!"
"Go out in that, lady, and no one can help you. Sorry." He wasn't.
Four technicians drew hoses from a cruiser. As the police advanced, they shot foam, gray and slimy over their heads. It splattered on the feet of the advancing rioters. Where it fell, so did the protestors.
Again, clubs rose and fell. Wyn pressed forward.
"Get her out of here," ordered the cop.
"Come on, lady. Move it, Professor." Forming a wall between her and the battle on the square, they forced her out a side door. She was breathing in gasps, forcing herself not to weep, not to swear. She had seen blood on the faces of students. Her students.
And she was powerless to help.
Around back, she saw President Kerr-Truman, still sweaty, pale now as he realized that his East Coast trophy had damn near been a casualty in this stupid private war of his.
They bundled her into a van, carefully unmarked with the University's crest. It sped down side streets, careful to avoid the press.
She waved away the offer to go straight to University Health or straight to LAX and back to Boston-Logan Airport and the refuge of her Cambridge home.
All she wanted was a bath, a drink, and a chance to do some thinking.
Even at dawn, blood and smoke still tainted the air. Jogging in place, Wyn Baker glanced about, surprised at her own wariness.
The gray college Gothic buildings of Los Angeles University's central square looked as if some inept army had tried to fight a rearguard action and lost.
Splashes of paint stained the walls, the bars, and the shattered glass of the narrow windows. Lower down were splashes of slimy white foam and other things she preferred not to remember.
Hard to believe how silent the square was now, the quiet broken only by the high whine of bugs and birds on a May morning that would kindle into torrid noon. Charred earth and blackened grass marked where students and trespassers from the nearby Welfare Island had kindled yesterday's bonfire.
She had come out prepared to fight. Around her neck hung her panic button. All she had to do was press it, and a signal went out, alerting a private security force that charged a no-doubt-sizable fee for being at the beck and call of security-conscious Taxpayers like her brother, who had insisted she wear it. Her account statements revealed a hefty monthly charge for its use. Studying it, she saw other companies bought into her account: McDonnell-Nomura, Kennicott Copper, tax-free municipals from some government resettling organization or other (they all sounded alike). She supposed she had the prospectus for it somewhere. She was more interested, though, in the balance her statement showed: enough and more than enough in the month's income statement to sustain her for a year. She could well afford to post bail for her students.
Statement, ID, and debit card lay in her beltpouch along with a map, the location of the police station carefully circled. Best go in now, she thought, post bail quietly and get her students out. She had some notion of bringing them back to her on-campus house for breakfast.
Better not, she told herself. She might as well tell her colleagues and her dean, accept the escort of however many university lawyers they would probably unleash, and, dressed in her most formal suit, drive ceremoniously to the station. Where, no doubt, things would take forever if they happened at all. She had suspicions that the lawyers would express "grave reservations" and other such language designed to stop her from doing what she thought was right until her brother could be called.
A campus cruiser whirred slowly toward her. Jogging alongside was a cleaning crew in coveralls and sunvisors. Workfare recipients? she thought. They ran in step, without the sloppy individualism of the Welfare Island denizens. Almost, she thought, as if they were programmed. Their coveralls bore the University seal. One lifted his visor to wipe his brow. His face was very young, his eyes blank. Students had an ugly word for the maintenance squads: campus nulls. No one knew where LAU found so many of them. Student myth insisted they had defaulted on their loans.
She ran by them, noting from the corner of her eye the rentacop's surprised look. Damn! He'd probably call that in. She turned a corner, looking down as her running shoes sent broken glass cracking and scattering, and scuffed through stained, torn paper. Legs and feet assumed the rhythm of a thousand morning runs on the streets by the Observatory or on the beach by the big old family place at Manchester. The smells were painfully different-urine and fear instead of clamshells and the salt sea.
She began to perspire, and her thick old gray sweatsuit settled into its familiar folds. She passed a broken shard of glass and saw the same lean woman she had seen reflected yesterday in the helmet of a hoplite's riot gear: sandy-colored, rather than vivid, but wholly resolved. The street narrowed here. The station . . . that turn, or the next?
She stopped and drew out her map.
"Yo!"
Wyn crumpled her map with one hand. With the other, slowly, she reached for her panic button.
"Not gonna hurt you, lady." It was a boy's voice, reedy despite the tough street cadences. "What you doin' here? Ain' no place for you."
"I'm trying to help out some friends," she answered before she thought. Don't let him know you have money, not him, and not whatever friends he's got with him. "They were . . . got caught in the riot yesterday."
"You the teacher?"
"What?" She jumped at the voice and unfamiliar presence that questioned when she had expected threat. Something about its tones reminded her of her student she had come out to rescue, and she replied in Spanish.
"Speak Anglo, lady, per favor. I need to learn it good and blow this fuckin' Island like hermanito mio. An' I don' understand your kind of talk."
"Your brother?" Eyes and voice and face flickered as the boy rose from behind a scribbled-over, rusted dumpster.
"In your class. How you think I know you?"
"Want to go with me to the station?" Wyn asked. "He was arrested in the riot, defending some of the other students. I'm going down there now to bail him-"
"No WAY!" cried the boy. "You stay clear. He's gone now, you gotta think of him as gone . . . . I'm telling you the truth. Get outta here fast."
"It is the law" Wyn said firmly, "that a Citizen-not just a Taxpayer, mind you-but any Citizen may post bail and be released unless he's done something for which bail is denied. It is the law." Echoes-we honor the laws, and we honor the laws that are above the laws-rumbled like thunder in her mind. Or maybe that was the junker that clattered by on malfunctioning airtreads, forcing Wyn and the boy against a stained wall.
"Law don' work for us." The street-crawler's whine came back into the boy's voice.
"There is always law."
"For you, maybe. Rich lady. WASP lady. You go and talk, and maybe they give you coffee, maybe they call you 'ma'am.' But it won't do no good." The boy scrubbed a fist across his face. "They're gone. Gotta think of it that way. Even our mama, and she cry all the time. Don't go, lady. You don't want them to know who you are."
"He's your brother," Wyn said. Her voice went high and reedy. It nettled her: here she was, prepared to go bail out her students, and this child warned her away. His own brother, for pity's sake.
The boy looked down. "He's gone. And you're off your turf." He shifted from foot to foot, uneasy.
"People coming?" she asked, arching one eyebrow up.
"If we stand here too long."
"Walk me to the station," she suggested. The longer she stood here, the less she liked the walls with their smeared graffiti and windows covered by broken boards or the way they pressed in on her, or how old-style dumpsters provided the sites of a hundred ambushes. "Get me there, and then take off."