Sonny
Friday morning, before we start, I detain the lawyers to talk about our schedule. The prosecution case will probably take another couple of days. We concluded yesterday with Molto doing a tiresome redirect of Lovinia, reading her snippets of her statements which she claimed not to remember. Following that, Rudy examined Maybelle Downey, an older woman who had witnessed June's shooting from a tenement across from the projects and who confirmed the same outward events Lovinia described. Now Tommy gives me the order of his remaining witnesses. Al Kratzus, the community service officer who told Nile his mother had been murdered will be first today; after him, Hardcore; by Monday we'll reach Eddgar. Following him, the People will rest. The PA's strategy, apparently, is to buttress Hardcore's credibility by showing that his account coincides with that of witnesses – white people – whose version is largely beyond doubt.
'The defense case, if there is to be one, will start by Wednesday?' I'm informing Hobie, who receives the news impassively. 'And what are your plans, Mr Tuttle? In terms of time? Not committing the defendant to offer evidence, of course, just projecting for my benefit.'
'Two days.'
' So we'll argue at the end of next week perhaps, or the following Monday?'
The three lawyers before the podium all nod. I will have to decide soon after – a disturbing prospect. The case remains murky. Why did this murder happen? I think suddenly. Frowning, I wave the lawyers away from the bench. Molto repeats the same gesture to Singh, who goes off to summon the next witness.
Aloysius Kratzus, a corpulent, white-haired, thick-necked police veteran fiddles a bit as he sits on the stand. Kratzus has the mark of a guy who went to Community Relations willingly, one of those coppers who started out to be a hero and ended up as a bureaucrat. No one gets shot in Community Relations. No one works graveyard. You dispense bad news, you visit schools, you read press releases over the phone, you front for the Force at funerals and ribbon cuttings. It's either a dead end or a comfortable retirement, depending on how you view things. Al Kratzus seems to like it just fine.
Rudy goes through Kratzus's rank and background and eventually reaches the morning of September 7. He had just come on, Kratzus says, 8 a.m., when he received a call. On his desk, you can envision the coffee and pastry in the white bag from the doughnut shop.
‘I spoke with Detective Lieutenant Montague.'
'And, Sergeant, was Lieutenant Montague making any orders or requests of you?'
'Montague said he was at a crime scene. White female, approx-mate age sixty to sixty-five, dead of multiple gunshot wounds. She was found outside a vehicle which was registered to her ex-husband. Montague was going with another dick to talk with the husband. In the meantime, there's a health-insurance card in her purse, shows a Nile Eddgar as next of kin. Somebody says he's a PO. Montague expects press will get this in a beat or two and he wants me to get over pronto to this Nile, so we tell him before he turns on the radio or TV and hears it that way.'
The entire answer is hearsay. Hobie has stroked his beard throughout, waiting for anything objectionable, and has apparently decided to let it pass.
'And did you oblige the lieutenant?' Rudy asks, in his funny, high-blown way. Rudy had three years of English public school before landing here. His father is one of those Indians with advanced degrees, never able to put them to use in any country. The family, Marietta says, has a liquor store on the East Bank.
'He give me the address and, along with Officer Vic Addison, I proceeded there. It was here in the city.' 'The city' means DuSable. Al Kratzus is one of those neighborhood guys, like my Uncle Moosh, who remember when this was still three little burgs, not, as the world now sees it, a single megalopolis. In those days, there were still intense rivalries among the Tri-Cities. At eighty, Moosh still discusses the fierce games that were once played in the bitter weather of late December between the public high-school football champs from Kewahnee, Moreland, and DuSable, and a single representative from the Catholic leagues.
Tommy is waving at his colleague. Rudy bends so Molto can whisper his suggestion.
'Yes,' says Rudy out loud. 'And in asking you to take on this assignment, sir, did Montague give any indication at that time that Nile Eddgar was a suspect?'
Hobie objects, but he pursued the issue of when and why Montague began to regard Nile as a suspect. I overrule.
'We're service, you know?' says Kratzus. 'In CR, we're not on the case. Our job is the public. If somebody's a suspect, Montague would assign one of his people.'
'Did you in fact see Nile Eddgar?'
'We did. Addison and I went to his apartment.' Kratzus sighs, minorly disgusted with the state of his memory later in life, and checks his pocket for the report, then fishes a stout finger there again to locate his readers. '2343 Duhaney.' 'And what time was it?'
'It was after 8 a.m., closer to 8:30. I was afraid at that hour we mighta missed him, but he was there. We had to pound awhile, but he come to the door. I identified my office. Somewhere in there we had to ask him to turn down the music actually, then I asked was he a relation to June Eddgar, he says he's the son, and I told him I was very sad -' Kratzus's hand does two forward flips. Etcetera, he means. 'And I give him the news. All what Montague told me. Just that one-liner, you know, that she'd been shot dead down at Grace Street.'
'And did he have any reaction that you were able to observe?'
'Pretty doggone strange,' says Kratzus.
'Oh, object!' Hobie loudly declares and shimmies his entire upper body in disapproval.
I strike the answer and direct Kratzus to tell the court precisely what the defendant said and did. He takes in my instruction slowly. There are plenty of police officers, bureaucrats, departmental politicos who get through thirty years on the Force with barely half a dozen court appearances. Kratzus seems like one of them.
'He give us a look. First off, it's a look. Kind of, you know, "Wait a minute." Not so much he doesn't believe it as it doesn't make sense.'
'Your Honor,' says Hobie.
'Mr Turtle, I'm going to accord the testimony the weight I feel it deserves.'
Kratzus has turned himself around in the witness chair to face me, too stiff and bulky to do so with ease, but eager to address me almost conversationally. His powder-blue coat bunches up thickly and the unbarbered fuzz of hairs on the back of his neck shows up, the filaments refracting the courtroom lights. He goes on explaining to me, notwithstanding the objection.
'I do this a lot, Judge. All kind of circumstances. Little old ladies dyin in bed. Suicides. Car wrecks. And people respond different. I'm the first to tell you that. But this was strange.'
'Sergeant,' I say, 'just stick with the outward behavior. What he said, what he did. How did he appear?'
'You know, Judge, it's the glazed look, his mouth is hangin open. Then he's gonna talk, then he doesn't. Finally, he takes himself and sits down on his sofa and says, "My father was supposed to be goin over there." Like he's explaining something. And that's it. For maybe ten seconds. Then suddenly, he starts in to cry.'
Rudy takes over again. 'Did you have further conversation, Sergeant, after he declared, "My father was supposed to go over there"?' Good prosecutorial question, driving home the critical line of testimony.
'We did. We told him where the remains would be and how they could be claimed. We give him a card with the P P' s number.' The Police Pathologist's. 'He was pretty shook up by then, so we left.'
'And following the interview, what did you do?'
'Back to the Hall. I left a message in voice mail for Montague, I needed to speak with him a.s.a.p.'
'And in your ordinary practice, would you be wanting to speak to the investigating detective?'
'Object,' says Hobie again tiredly. He doesn't bother to rise. The body language suggests another silly excess by the PAs. Hobie's objections have been well timed and usually on point, so that by now I've developed a reflex that he's correct. But I recognize this time he's trying to gull me.
'No, I'll hear this.'
'Generally, we have no need. You know, maybe I'll leave a message, "We done like you asked," I'll send up a 5-sheet' – a police report, named long ago in the days when there were five layers, with carbons – 'but you know, most times they got no need to hear from us.'
'So what if anything motivated your call to the lieutenant?'
'Judge,' implores Hobie.
'I'll sustain now.' But the point is made: Old plowhorse or not, Kratzus thought the kid was wrong. He was taking something off him and knew Montague ought to get a detective out to see Nile, find out what the hell he meant that his father was supposed to have been there.
Rudy sits. I nod to Hobie for his cross.
'Just a few questions,' he begins. It's more than that, but he accomplishes little. Kratzus admits he's seen lots of strange reactions when he's imparted news of a loved one's death. And Hobie combats the implication of Rudy's question about the time of the visit, which suggested that Nile was late for work and might have been waiting at home for a call, by pointing out that loud music was on, which would have made it hard to hear the phone.
'And you say that you're not sent out to speak with suspects, right?'
'Not generally.'
'And who was it Montague was going to talk to?'
'The father,' says Kratzus. Catching the drift, he adds, "Cause it was his car. You figure he'd know what she was doin down there.'
'Okay,' says Hobie, unwilling to press the point. A few questions later he terminates the cross. Significantly, he does not dispute the accuracy of Kratzus's memory. That means Kratzus wrote a report that day, and that his partner, Addison, will back him up. Kratzus, with his bulk, heads out the doors of the courtroom, but stops at the prosecution table to shake hands. He did a good job.
Aside from the fingerprints on the money, this is the best piece of evidence the state has offered yet. One statement. One line. Yet it has a clear impact: Nile expected Eddgar to be there; Nile expressed surprise not that there had been a shooting but only who its victim was. The first questions anyone, no matter how shocked, normally would ask are, Who shot her? Why? How could this have happened? I have my eyes closed, letting the proof work its way down through the emotional latticework. My reaction creates a lingering moment of gravity that grips the entire courtroom. When I look up, both prosecutors are watching me tensely.
I call the lunch recess then, but don't get out the door. By the time I've conferred briefly with Marietta about the 2:00 call, Molto is in front of the bench. Hobie, typically, has found a way to disrupt Molto's calm. Tommy is livid, red up to his hairline. Hobie has presented Tommy with defense exhibits: Nile's 1994 tax return, his 1995 wage records, his bankbooks, his checking account statements. Molto waves all these documents about and finally lays them before me.
'Judge, we should have received these documents before trial.'
'What's the point of them?' I ask.
'I don't care what the point is, really. He's not supposed to be producing exhibits now. And he won't say what the point is. We've asked him six times.'
'Mr Turtle?'
'Really, Your Honor,' he says, with a sweet little smile. 'Are you declining to say?'
'No, I'll say. I'll say. I'd have thought it would be obvious to these prosecutors. But I guess not. The point, Your Honor, is that there is not a cash withdrawal exceeding $300 in all of 1995, which is not surprising, since my client's savings never were greater than $3,200.' Nile didn't have the money to pay Hardcore, not $10,000 cash, that's the point.
Tommy explodes again. Sandbagging, he calls it. Which is exactly what it is. Tommy goes on at high volume, ignoring Singh's efforts to soothe him.
'Mr Turtle,' I say, ‘I can't see how you could have failed to think about these records before.'
'Your Honor, what about them?’ He points. 'Really, Judge Klonsky. Here they are, planning to put a witness on the stand to claim my client paid him $10,000 in cash, and they haven't bothered asking themselves where the money came from? It's not a secret my client files tax returns or has a bank account. They should have thought of this, too. And the defense discovery response notified them we might put in these records.'
Hobie hands up a boilerplate filing the State Defenders use in every case, but he's got a point. 'Bank records' and 'tax records' are mentioned as possible defense exhibits, along with forty or fifty other categories of documentary evidence, everything from pathologists' studies to ballistics reports. Molto, scattershot, never pressed for details and Hobie waited in the weeds. The lawyering life, I think.
'All right. Mr Turtle, I want you to do a better job getting things to the state. Go through this discovery response and before the weekend produce any exhibits you might use. This is the last surprise, do you hear me? Given the state's lack of diligence in demanding production, I'm not going to exclude. But I won't be so generous next time.'
At my ruling, Tommy groans out loud. Singh attempts to drag off Molto, who, in spite of his soft, unathletic shape, has struck a bantam pose in the well of the courtroom, facing Hobie like he's spoiling for a fight. Tommy is still too furious to see that he's been outflanked again by Hobie. The good trial lawyer always wants the state's best evidence quickly forgotten. Instead of mulling over Kratzus's direct, I'm now heading off to lunch asking myself where Nile could have gotten the money he supposedly gave Hardcore. Did he borrow it? Steal it? Hobie's right. Molto should have thought of this. Then again, Nile's fingerprints are on the money. That will be Tommy's answer in the end: it happened. The devil finds a way. It happened.
As the courtroom comes back to life, I remain a minute on the bench, assessing all of this, then find, as I gather my things, I'm facing the jury box again. Seth, once more, is waiting for me to take note of him there. By now, there is a rhythm to this, as if he knows I'll only have time to acknowledge him at the end of the session. Yesterday afternoon, I was somewhat alarmed to find him gone. I didn't know if it was the sweaty mess he'd made of his sport coat or, as I suspected, the heavy load of what we'd been discussing which kept him from returning. I was unsettled myself. To lose a child! The thought came hurtling at me all night. We never remember that even a century ago, this shroud, this burden, was commonplace. Talk about improving our quality of life!
But Seth looks all right now. He greets me with a chipper little smile and then a wink. Like all his gestures this week, it's slightly forward but too well-meant to do any real harm. Hello, he's saying. I'm here now, I'm okay. We're friends. And to my mild amazement, I find, before I've had time to think better of it, I've winked back.
'Ordell Trent!' Small, sallow, mussed as the weekend approaches, Tommy Molto bleats the name when I tell the prosecution to call its next witness, as we settle in after lunch.
'Ordell Trent!' Annie repeats. The name rolls on twice more, the transport deputy at the door shouting to a colleague in the rear, the second one yelling into the cage for Ordell to bring himself to the door. The keys jangle. Through the wall we hear the solid rumble of the lockup door sliding back, and the second deputy loudly warning one of the leftovers from the just-concluded bond call to stand away. Then, after a lingering moment, Hardcore steps into the courtroom. He has been here before, when he entered a guilty plea in late September. But I knew less about him then. Now, like a lion emerging from a cave, Ordell briefly blinks away the harsh fluorescence and serenely takes in a room full of persons somewhat terrified by what they've heard about him. Behold: the killer.
'Mr Trent.' I point him to the witness stand. His hands are cuffed, and one of the deputies approaches to release him. Then Hardcore, somewhat stout, hugely muscled across the chest, slopes toward me, with sufficient assurance to make it a mildly uncomfortable moment.
'Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?'
'Sure do.' He drops his hand and settles in the witness chair.
Tommy is at the podium. His brief preparatory cough resounds through the courtroom, over which a deliberative stillness has fallen. Even Nile, in a blue blazer today, appears sufficiently focused to be taken as tense.
Hardcore states his name and present residence in the KCJ, Kindle County Jail.
'Are you known by any other name?'
'Gangster tag.' He rolls out the word: 'Hardcore.'
'Why don't you spell it for the reporter?' Tommy suggests.
'Oh, now,' says Hardcore. 'Get spelled any number of ways. H, a, r, d, k, o, r, p, s. Thass one I seen.' On the walls. He probably never has cause to write it himself. An odd thought: this name, this word, does not have a parallel existence in the world of letters – it's like some subatomic particle that exists only in physicists' calculations. Gang life is out there somewhere, an intense physical reality with no tie to a more refined realm of symbols.
On the stand, Hardcore looks determinedly relaxed, slumping a bit. In the gallery, amid the faces, I'm sure there are many T-4 Rollers, come to see Core. As a result, he will not allow himself to appear awed. The truth of gang life is that many are primarily hangers-on, gawkers, lookouts, the adoring masses through whom the true thugs promote their name. In other words, as it often is with kids: one bad actor and ten who think he's cool.
Hardcore is well rehearsed and far more co-operative than Bug. Tommy leads him along carefully. The prosecutors' strategy is apparent. As with Lovinia, they have made, quite literally, no effort to dress up Hardcore. He sits here in the sheriff’s-department' s blue coveralls, an ever-present reminder of his guilty plea and his acknowledged complicity in the crime. Like Bug, Core's clearly been told to be himself. He talks the same language he speaks outside. Tommy wants me to remember at all moments that this is the murdering hoodlum whom Nile Eddgar took up with as a friend.
Consistent with this plan, the first thing Tommy brings out is Core's lengthy juvenile record and his two earlier felony convictions as an adult, both for distribution of narcotics. His initial penitentiary sentence, at the age of nineteen, was for three years. His second – for possession of fourteen ounces of cocaine recovered from a car he was driving – was ten years, no parole. He got out four years ago. Like Lovinia, Hardcore has made an impressive deal in exchange for his testimony: twenty years for conspiracy to murder, which will amount to ten years inside. The criminal justice system recognizes the same rule as accountants: First in, first out. The flipper has to be rewarded.
'Now prior to your present incarceration, Mr Trent, what was your profession?'
'Gangster,' he answers.
'Were you a member of any criminal organization?'
'BSD,' he says, 'be for me.' A familiar slogan. Hardcore amuses himself. The sandy scratchings of a goatee frame his mouth and his large teeth have a yellowish cast when he smiles.
'What was your position in BSD?'
'Top Rank.'
'Were you one of the leaders of the gang, one of the shot-callers?' 'S'pose so.' 'Who is above you?' 'J. T-Roc. Kan-el.' Tommy identifies them by name.
' And how, sir, did you make a living prior to your incarceration?'
'Slanging.'
'Slanging?'
'Slanging dope.' 'Hanging, banging, and slanging' is the motto of gang life. In that street doggerel, slang, which originally meant to talk the talk, now is the term for selling drugs – a telling change.
'What kind of dope did you slang?'
'Mostly crack. Some wire.' Wire is another name for speed.
'Anything else?'
'Oh yeah,' says Hardcore mildly. Core, who is yet to be sentenced and not eager to make himself look any worse, is sluggish with his responses, but Tommy persists and forces him to admit he also sold PCP, methadone, rock cocaine, heroin, and some stolen prescription drugs. He had an organization, he says, of at least ten people working for him, which included Lovinia. 'And do you know Nile Eddgar?'
His face broadened with surly amusement, Core's thick eyes find the defendant. Hobie nudges his client and Nile, with one hand on the chair arm, as if he needs a boost, rises for the formal courtroom identification. Core continues smiling after pointing him out. Nile takes his seat, face averted, cowed and shaken, while Hardcore continues to smile.
'How did you come to know the defendant?'
'He my PO.'
'Your probation officer?'
'He keepin his eye on me for the court.' Parole has been abolished in this state in most instances. Instead, narcotics offenses and certain other crimes carry a period of supervised release.
'How long has he been your PO?'
'Seem like a year nearly. Had me couple others.'
'And how often did you see Nile?'
'Oh, you know, up the top, once a month.'
'And where did you see him?'
'T-4.'
'And what was the reason for his visit?'
'You know, man. Kinda check me out.'
'Eventually, did you begin to see him more often?'
'Yeah, how it come down, man got to be PO for a whole damn bunch of T-4's.'
'He was assigned to be PO to other members of the T-4 Roller set of the Black Saints Disciples?'
'Right,' says Core.
'Do you know how that came about?' 'Seem like he think he be kinda slammin, kickin it with us.' I sustain Hobie's objection to the witness testifying about the defendant's state of mind. Tommy tries it again.
'Did he tell you he'd asked for the assignment?' Hardcore actually appears to ponder. 'Yeah, man, cause how it were, I 'member him comin out one day -' 'When?' asks Tommy.
'Say like December, and you know, I'm like, "Dang, bo, you gettin in my shit, seein you mo than bad weather."
'And he sayin like lot them POs don't wanna get with it at the IV Tower, get they asses shot and shit, and he like, he don't mind none. You know, so he goin, "Gimme they-all, they down by me."'
'That's what he said? That he told other officers he'd accept the files because he didn't mind coming to the IV Tower?'
'Uh-huh. You know he got Winky, Crouch, Warbone, Handman, Turkey Swoop.' Together, Tommy and Hardcore try, with only limited success, to bring out the names of the remaining members whom Nile supervised. 'Dang,' says Core, 'what that cuz be named?' Tommy lets it go.
Closer to me than he has been before, Hardcore, I note, is no child. He looks to be in his mid-thirties, but all youth is gone from him. His face is closed-down and tough, the black, wide, rheumy eyes slow-moving, his look always insolent. What the guards privately – and out of no small measure of fear – call jailhouse trash. When he lifts a hand to scratch his cheek, I see that his nails have grown long and that each is capped by an amber section perhaps three-quarters of an inch, adding the insinuation of a strange, random element in his character.
'And once he assumed this role, how often was Nile at the Tower?'
'Most days, seem like.'
'And what was the nature of your relationship?' 'We ain gettin tight or nothin, but I be knowin the dude. He cool and all. Like to be hangin most the time.' 'What do you mean by hanging?'
'You know, man, down by them doorways, hangin with the homies, hearin the hoot. Laughin, you know. Just hangin and all'
'Did he require you to fill out monthly probation reports?' Hardcore smiles and lets a hand blow by. Not so he remembers. 'And over time, did you ever meet any members of his family?' 'Uh-huh,' says Core. 'Who was that?' 'Met his daddy.' 'Senator Loyell Eddgar?'
'Loyell, huh? That his name?' Hardcore draws in his cheeks. White folks.
'And how did that meeting take place?'
'Well, see now, thass a tale.' In the witness chair, Core laughs and rearranges himself, crossing a leg to tell his story. 'Seem like one day, you know, man, we by them benches by the Tower, and I'm rappin to Nile, cause, you know, got to be cool with the PO, right? And we get with it, I go like, "Yo, that DOC, man" ' -Department of Corrections – ' "they damn ornery with our cuz Kan-el, man, they stepped on his release twice, man, and he done his time, man, that's just bitch-ass cold, they just steppin on him cause they know he tip-top BSD, cause he down for his, ain counta no tickets or nothin he done in there, can't be, cause ain nobody gone say shit bout him, even if he done it. You hear what I'm sayin?'
'And so Nile, he like, "You-all oughta best be talkin with my daddy, you and you homes."
'And I like, "Who-all you daddy?"
'Oh, man, nigger, my daddy he be it, he got power, Jack, he a senator and shit, he done got me my job.'
Tommy interrupts. 'Nile told you that? That the Senator had gotten him his job?' With this nugget, Tommy slides his eyes at the reporters in the jury box.
'Yeah, he gone on all bout his daddy. Say, "Man, he on some committee or shit, them DOC they gotta listen up on him, he get on them, it be all over. Y'all oughta meet him. No lie. Maybe dude can help you out some." He be goin like that.'
'And did you agree to meet the Senator?'
'You know, not up the top, but Nile, man, he be, you know, you say persistent. Got to be a thang, you know. "You-all wanna get with my daddy? My daddy and all wanna get with you."
'So one time, man, I kickin with I-Roc and we fall to this thang, how my PO sky-up bout we oughta get with his daddy, help out cuz Kan-el. And ‘I-Roc, he like, "Might be fat, could be fat, we kickin some serious shit here."
'So I say to Nile, "Yo, okay, we get it on with you daddy." '
'And did you finally meet Senator Eddgar?'
'Sure enough.'
'When?'
'May. Seem like about then 'cause it gettin to be warm, you know?'
'And where did this meeting take place?'
Gazing downward, Hardcore laughs, again his mind full of the scene. 'See now, man, we done a lot fussin bout that, cause ‘I-Roc, you know, he ain tight with too many white folks, and you know, Nile was buzzin me how his daddy so busy and shit. So we got it finally, we gone meet in T-Roc's SEL?'
'You met in Jeff T-Roc's Mercedes, is that correct?' Tommy again briefly faces the press gallery. Like the customs dogs who smell drugs through steel casings, the reporters are on alert now. Here it comes. Scandal. A politician in the back seat of a limousine with street-gang leaders. One of those memorable courthouse stories – people in odd places, doing things no one could imagine. Through his fussy courtroom manner, Molto is unable to contain a discordant element: distaste for Eddgar. The Senator may be the state's witness, but the prosecutor holds him and his antics in low regard.
'And where was the car located when you met?'
'North End, man, can't remember quite 'xactly, some corner.'
'And how long did the meeting last?'
'Say, bout half hour or so.'
'And who was present?'
'Nile, me, T-Roc, and the daddy.' 'Senator Eddgar?'
'Yeah, him,' answers Core, with a brief scowl. He does not like Eddgar either.
'And can you tell us what was said?'
Core hoots, scoffing somewhat at the memory. 'Man, we was thinkin, we gone get Kan-el out. And this dude, the daddy, he all like whacked or somethin. He like, you know, got his own program, man. We goin, "Yo, we-all, we got do this thang here, get Kan-el flyin."
'And he like, "Oh me, no no, we best be organizin this shit and all." I mean it was powerful, way he went on.'
'Was it Senator Eddgar's idea that BSD would be the basis for a political organization?'
'That's what I'm sayin here.'
'And how did you and T-Roc react?'
'T-Roc? After some ticks, this motherfucker, the daddy, he just up on himself, man, and ‘I shoot me kind of a look, he like to posse out. He all ready to book, then he come and get it, he in his own car. Kinda funny,' Core adds and once more displays that ample smile. 'Anyways, they get theyself out pretty soon there, and T-Roc, he be like,' 'Can you believe this limp mother?" Man, he was burned. He was deep.'
'And did you speak with Nile?'
'Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.'
'When and where?'
'Next time he come round T-4. In that next week there. I like to wail on Nile. "That all's just a psych, man, that motherfucker just playin us, man."
'And Nile, he kind of, you know, shrug and all. "That how he be. He play you."
‘I say, "I ain down for that, no motherfucker play me, daddy or no. Got to stall out on that shit, man. I go head up any motherfucker, man, do me like that. I'd cap that motherfucker soon as look at him." I, you know, be goin like that.'
'And what, if anything, did Nile say?'
'Well, you know, he kind of like lookin, like he just ain gone believe nobody be ravin on his daddy like that. And I'm like, "Fuck you, motherfucker, fuck you up, too, you want." I'm trippin and all'
At intervals, I've had some instinct to curb Hardcore's language. This is still a courtroom, to which the public is invited. But he is too natural, too forceful a storyteller in his own mode to bear much interruption. Even Hobie, who until this moment has had the star turn here, seems to have no urge to slow him down. Core, quite evidently, is enjoying himself. Over the months I've been sitting in Criminal, I've been struck by how often a simple, childish desire for attention accounts for the presence of many of these young people. Most of these kids grow up feeling utterly disregarded – by fathers who departed, by mothers who are overwhelmed, by teachers with unmanageable classrooms, by a world in which they learn, from the TV set and the rap of the street, they do not count for much. Crime gathers for them, if only momentarily, an impressive audience: the judge who sentences, the lawyer who visits, the cops who hunt them – even the victim who, for an endless terrified moment on the street, could not discount them.
'And following this exchange in which you informed Nile you were angry with his father, did you have any other conversation with Nile about Senator Eddgar?'
'Nah,' says Core, and freezes Tommy. 'Not first. Then, you know, one day, might even be a month gone by, we all just kickin round T-4 and he come up on me, and he, like first thing, he a'ks me, "Yo, like, you really cool with that shit, how you fade my daddy?"
'So I be thinkin, Oh, you done it now, nigger, this PO, he gone get in yo face how you rippin on his daddy. "I's just talkin shit," I say, and soon as I done said it, I can see, you know, like he busted.'
'Disappointed?' asks Tommy.
'Right,' says Hardcore, 'right. So maybe two weeks later, man, I like, "So how is it, dude, you really be wantin me to smoke you daddy?"
'And he say like that, "Yeah, I do." '
'Who's he?' Tommy asks. 'Who were you talking to?'
'Nile.'
'The defendant?' 'Yeah, right.'
Nile, when I look, has his chin at Hobie's shoulder. He is speaking to him with greater animation than he's shown at any point until now. Hobie is nodding emphatically, as his expensive pen races across the yellow pad.
'And where were you? When you had this talk? Who was around?'
'Just me and him. You know how it is, when he come down round T-4, I's sort of, you know, gettin him back to his 'mobile, so he don't get jacked or nothing.'
'So you were escorting him down the street near T-4 to his car?'
"Xactly,' says Core. "He like, "I give you $25,000, you fade him."
'And I go like, "Yo, you bent, man." ' "Uh-uh", he say, "hell I am anyhow, I mean what I say, you do it."
'I like, "Man, motherfucker, I see you motherfuckin money, we gone know you mean that you behind it."
'Whoa! Dude not down with that. He were burnin, ready to tear it up. I ain never seed him like that, man. He get up in my face.
'"I know you here slanging dope and shit, Hardcore. You think I don't know? Put you nigger-ass back in the Yard any time I say. You under paper as it is, Core. I pull you down whenever I like. Man, don't be trippin wit' me now. This here yo idea from the jump."
'"No way, motherfucker, this nigger ain but goin on.'*
'We trippin on that some, who say do it, but I seen he stomp-down on this, and I ain takin no ride.'
'You agreed to do it, rather than have him revoke your release?'
'Say I gone think on it some. And you know, then, every time I see the dude, he on me, "You gone do this, nigger, or ain you? Thought you was some bad-ass Top Rank gangbangin motherfucker, but you just some bitch-ass sissy like all them elderly niggers down the corner by Best Way Liquor with they forty zones of Colt." He on me all the time.'
Tommy stands a moment and frowns at his witness, clearly afraid that Hardcore, caught up in his performance, has gone straight over the top.
'Did you finally agree to kill Senator Eddgar?'
'Ain never finally agreed, till one day he come up, he got that newspaper bag.' Core points, and from the prosecution table, Tommy retrieves People's 1, the money and the blue newspaper bag in which it was wrapped. 'He gimme that.'
'Where were you?'
'T-4. On Grace Street. He by his ride, ain't even got hisself out. He just come up by there and tell Bug, "Go fetch Core." And I come on down, there he be, and he hand me that-there through the window. Say, "I give you the rest when you done it."'
'When was this?'
'August. Hot.'
'And what did you say?'
'I say, "Motherfucker, you fixin for me to do this?" 'He be like, "Uh-huh, I am."
'So I figure, well, okay, then gone have to get wit' it, otherwise he gone pull my paper sure enough.'
Tommy finishes laying an evidentiary foundation for the money. Hardcore says he took the bag to the home of Doreen McTaney, the mother of his son Dormane, and left it there until after the killing. He identifies his initials, next to Montague's on the evidence tag. With the money and the plastic bag now fully tied to the defendant and the crime, Molto moves for admission of the exhibits.
'Any objection?' I ask Hobie.
He purses his lips. 'Can I reserve for cross?' Hobie knows every trick. Having no basis to keep the money out of evidence, he wants to delay its admission in the hope that in the welter of last-minute details, the prosecutors will forget to reoffer the proof. Across his shoulder, Tommy tosses an irked look. By now he expects Hobie to be difficult. I admit the money, subject to cross, and Tommy picks up the thread with Core, whom he asks about preparations for the killing.
'Got with Gorgo and them. Tell Gorgo get him a good clean spout' – 'A clean spout' would be a weapon that would not trace – 'we got us to put in some work. Then I went rapping to Dooley Bug.'
'Is that Lovinia Campbell?' 'Uh-huh.'
'What did you tell her?'
Probably to keep Core from getting rolling again, Hobie objects for lack of foundation, meaning that Core has not said precisely when, where, and with whom the conversation took place. Tommy starts to explain, but Core has been around enough courtrooms to understand and interrupts.
'This here's day before we done it. Up the IV Tower. Just me and her.' He looks toward Hobie and sneers: Think what you think, motherfucker, but I ain dumb. I doubt, however, anyone here has made the mistake of questioning Core's smarts.
'And what did you tell her?'
'Put it down to her. Whole scene, you know.'
'What did you tell her specifically about Nile?'
'Nile and me, we fixin to gauge his daddy.'
'What did she say?'
'Oh, you know. "Why-all we gotta be doin like that?" That kinda shit.'
'And you said?'
' "Yo, freeze up, ho. You just be working here." ' The unvarnished accuracy and vehemence with which Core recalls his response provokes momentary laughter in the courtroom. Core smiles, as if he had fully calculated his audience's reaction in advance.
'Did Bug know Nile?'
'Hell yeah, she know Nile. Lotsa time he come round, she be rappin to him. He like her caseworker or some such. She kickin on them benches wit' him, rap for hours seem like. She know him good.'
Tommy glances my way, just to be sure I've registered that: Nile was nice to Lovinia, she'd want to protect him.
The remainder of the direct is somewhat anticlimactic. Core explains the plan, how Lovinia called him when June showed up. When he gets to the point where June was shot, Core winds his head around sorrowfully over the mistake.
'And when was the last time you spoke to Nile Eddgar?'
'Morning all this comin down. He beep when I's fixin to leave out, so I give him a shout off the pay phone down there in T-4, say all this cool.' Tommy takes hold of the computer records from Nile's phone and directs Core's attention to the call to his pager at 6:03 a.m. Core affirms this is the page which he answered from the pay phone outside the IV Tower. Then Tommy cleverly uses the various stipulated phone records to review the entire direct. 'Was this call on May 14 around the time you agreed to meet Senator Eddgar? Was this call on August 7 around the time you agreed to kill him?'
When he's done, it's near 4:30 and we adjourn. The transport deputies cuff Core to walk him back. His lawyer, Jackson Aires, who has watched the proceedings from a folding chair just inside the Plexiglas partition, approaches Core at the lockup door and rests a hand on his shoulder as they consult, nodding emphatically, telling Core he's done well. Hobie has gathered up his boxes quickly, and pushes Nile, who is still gesticulating toward Hardcore, out of the courtroom. Tommy and Rudy – and Montague, who's entered to help haul things downstairs – are lingering at the prosecution table, smiling among themselves. They've had their ups and downs but the week has ended well. The reporters have disappeared, as if by magic, all racing to beat deadline with today's spicy item: 'A convicted gang leader testified today that the plot to murder Senator Loyell Eddgar began when gang leaders angrily rebuffed Eddgar's efforts to turn the Black Saints Disciples into a political organization.'
A weird story, but it has the eerie resonance of a tale too odd to be untrue. In the subdued clamor of the spectators' departure, I sit still on the bench, gripping my pen and staring at the pages of the bench book, which are covered with the hurried notes I've made today. The critical line from Kratzus – 'My father was supposed to be goin over there' – is underscored at the top of the upper left-hand side. Considering it all, an omen bounds home in me: I'm going to find Nile Eddgar guilty.
Nikki loves costumes. She imagines herself with stylish dos and beaded gowns. I took to heart my mother's distaste for glamour and am always alarmed. Where does Nikki get these ideas? I wonder. Is this the penalty for working, for not being at her side twenty-four hours a day? When I pick her up from day care tonight, she is wearing plastic high heels on the wrong feet and a crown.
'I'm getting married!' she squeals.
Married! my heart shrieks, but I take her in with kisses, knowing that this instant when we're reconnected for the weekend is, in ways, the point toward which I've been journeying all week.
'We have stew for dinner. Just the way you like it.'
'No peas?' she asks.
'Not one.'
When Nikki was born, I decided I would become organized. I would cook meals in advance and freeze them, like my friend Grace Tomazek. I would keep extensive grocery lists so that I would no longer have to go to the store three times each day. I would start shopping from catalogues for clothes, and buy a season ahead so I was not desperate when the weather changed. I would sign up for Moms and Tots on Saturdays. Finally an adult, I would have a life reflecting forethought rather than waning moods and windblown caprice. I wanted this with desperate, almost unbearable longing, as the sign of some gathering of myself, as an affirmation of the capacity of any person to make her life a bit more bearable.
And I succeeded, after a fashion. Oh, of course, I become preoccupied – with the cases before me, with one feud or another with Charlie, with the madness in Bosnia or a memory of my mother that has not visited me in years, anything that catches me on the spike of passion and ends up making me seem, especially to myself, unfocused, even scatterbrained. But for the most part, I have made my life less a momentary adventure. Nikki and I have a routine. There are meals in the freezer, which I, generally speaking, remember to defrost. The lunch bag is packed. Amid the whirl of single-mom responsibilities, I often feel like one of those little old ladies, Old World ethnics dressed all in black, wobbling around like a top about to fall. On occasion, I'm undermined by uncertainty about myself. A few months back, as I was listening to the discordant screech of Avi, Gwendolyn's son, sawing away at his Suzuki violin, I was jarred by panic. What was I going to do about music lessons? I'd never even thought of it. I called piano teachers all night. Lately, I've felt pangs because Nikki knows nothing of religion. But it happens, all of it. My life has what planning always seemed to imply: a center, weight, substance. Love.
Love. I've been so lucky! I think all the time. Not in the ordinary outward sense that people have in mind with that phrase. Because, after all, I've had my pratfalls and distractions, my own tough patches, sickness and divorce, the ordinary major miseries of an ordinary existence. But I'm so lucky to have Nikki, to have someone to love, unambiguously and durably, someone for whom my love will never falter. Love, whatever it means, has otherwise been an unreliable thing in my life. With my mother. With men. In my younger years, it made no sense to me that one word referred to sexual relations and your family. You have to get older for all of that to cohere, to understand it comes down to the same thing, intensity, connection, commitment, some Mecca toward which your soul can always pray.
After dinner, a bath. Nikki frolics, inventing games with Barbie dolls who, except for the moments of their evening drowning, dwell on the tub side in consummate nudity, despairing, no doubt, over the sad fate of their plastic hair, which Nikki's repeated stylings have left a mass of ratted knots.
'I like Jenna better than Marie,' says Nikki, 'but they're both black.'
Once again, panic is forestalled. Teach. Always teach.
'You know, Nikki, whether someone is nice has nothing to do with the color of their skin. You're nice from the inside, not the outside.'
She pouts, she bugs her eyes. 'Mommy, I know that.' Some propositions are obvious, even to a six-year-old.
Eventually, I extract her from the tub. Already, I find myself longing for the baby who has only recently disappeared, the three-and four-year-old with her winsome malapropisms. 'It's gark outside.' 'Hum on' for 'come on.' Now she sometimes seems a being of unknown origins, with tastes and even physical attributes I've never encountered in myself or even Charlie. Where does she get these fingers, I wonder as I'm toweling her dry, which look tallowy as melting party candles?
'Have I told you how wonderful you are?' I ask, kneeling beside Nikki's bed.
'No,' Nikki answers at once, as she does each evening. 'Well, you're wonderful. You're the most wonderful person I know. Have I told you how much I love you?'
'No,' she answers, squirming shamefaced against my chest.
'I love you more than anything in the world.'
I cuddle her until she sleeps, an indulgence I should not permit, but it's a precious moment, again the simplest atom, nucleus, and particle. Asleep, Nikki is soft and smells sweetly of her shampoo.
Afterwards, in the quiet house, I lounge in the living room. A glass of white wine is spun experimentally by the stem between my fingertips. At long last, I reach the glorious moment when I remove my pantyhose. Now, after the parade of the day is over, I find out what has stuck, before it grows into something new in the hothouse of dreams. Night sounds rise up from the city: wind against the gutters, passing cars, teens a block away exuberant with their mischief. Above the painted brick fireplace a Modigliani hangs, a narrow-faced girl in whose inscrutable pose I have always recognized something of myself. While Charlie lived here, I spent hours staring at that painting, since I was loath to move around while the poet was in the throes of creation. From Charlie's study in the extra bedroom, the strong blue smoke of his hand-rolled cigarettes would penetrate the room. He used tobacco brands you saw in Westerns – Bugler and Flag – and could dip his thick fingers into the pouches and line a paper without ever looking up from the page. His concentration as he wrote was fabulous. He wouldn't have heard The Bomb. But he demanded that the house be still, and so until he finished – and God knew when that would be -1 would work out here with a cup of tea, cringing if the cup even rang on the saucer, love's zombie, an unhappy refugee in my own home.
And with this memory, as the fretting of the work week recedes, as the courtroom with its tentacles of repulsion and fear falls behind me, I am arrowed by the terrible humbling poignance of the simplest truth. I'm busy, fly-about, overburdened. True enough. But I know this secret, too: In the marrow of the bone, where blood is made and beliefs are gathered, I'm hungry for the intimate company of other humans. I am lonely. And it is not merely a symptom of divorce. There were years, years married to Charlie, when I felt like this, wondering, as I still do, how long it will go on.
And then unpredictably – stealthy as a thief – the line that went by in passing days ago returns, haloed with all the urgent sincerity with which it was spoken.
'How many people,' Seth asked, 'how many people do you get close to in a life?'
MAY 2, 197o Seth
I did not sleep further after June's visit. It was 3:30 by then and I lay awake, telling myself no, then yes, telling myself it was crazy and wrong, and then that it was right for just that reason. Near 5:00, when I was going to leave, I called Hobie's. Lucy's voice was slurred with sleep. 'He's not here,' she whispered.
Hobie kept luxurious hours. He read all night and had not attended a morning class throughout college. I was sure that Lucy, pliant as ever, was under instructions to tell me he wasn't there, but when I challenged her, a tide of distress rose through her voice.
'He hasn't spent the night here all week,' she cried, then went quiet. She said I could leave a message at Cleveland's. 'If anyone picks up the phone,' she added.
I tried to think. 'How you hanging?' I asked eventually.
'Shitty.'
That required no explanation. I told her I needed to see her, to say goodbye if nothing else, and we agreed to meet on Polk Street, where Lucy had an appointment that afternoon. After work, I crawled through the Saturday traffic, in an uneven mood. I had just made my farewells at After Dark. My days as a sci-fi columnist – the only line of work I'd ever felt any pride in – were now at an end. I'd hugged Harley Minx. He gave me a guidebook to Vancouver. Then I'd gone out the swinging back doors, with their rubber bumpers to protect against the damage done by the hand trucks, and left one more portion of my life behind me, knowing it was nothing I'd have chosen to do.
Polk Street was the usual florid scene. Hell's Angels, drag queens in cheap dresses, and leather cowpokes all paraded on the avenue, while shoppers ran between the cafes and exotics stores. A white-haired woman in a tight sweater stood on a comer with a pure-white cockatoo on her shoulder.
At the sight of Lucy, I brought the car to a squealing halt. She stood on the corner, looking dazedly into the sun, searching for me perhaps. Blood was streaming down her cheeks.
I leaned out the window, waving and yelling, and finally drew to the curb. By the time I'd pushed her through the passenger door, horns were sounding in a rough chorus behind me in the traffic. In my sideview, I saw a cop approaching and I jerked the Bug into the street, strangely frightened by the thought of an encounter with the police.
'Jesus,' I said, 'Jesus. What's going down? What happened to you?' I asked if she wanted to go to the hospital. She had popped her contacts into her open palms and sat with her head thrown back.
‘I do it all the time,' she said. ‘I forget I have my lenses in. I cry and then I rub my eyes and it cuts something. Just on the surface of the eyeball. I'll be all right. Oh God,' she said and began to cry again. The tears, now a milder pink, streaked her face. I drove around and finally parked up on Russian Hill.
She had seen a herbalist, someone she had heard about, a hippie with a tiny third-story shop. 'For what?'
She faltered. 'My skin.' Lucy was freckled but her complexion was otherwise unblemished.
'Your skin? What do you have, like a rash?'
She rolled her eyes at my dullness. One of her contacts was in her mouth, for cleaning, and she had to spit it out before she could speak.
'Two weeks ago Hobie got rid of the dog? He took it out to Campus Boul and tied it to a parking sign. He said he wasn't going to live with a big white animal.' She peered, waiting for me to understand. 'I heard they have something you chew? You know? For maybe a month? It like works gradually. It makes your skin darker. It like dyes you? It's pigment or something. I don't know. Anyway, the guy didn't have it. He said he'd heard of it, but he didn't have it and wasn't sure where I could get it. And I just came out of there, I had this feeling like "Oh, man, it's never going to work.'' I mean, my whole life is falling apart, Seth. What am I going to do?'
My reaction, of course, was that it was crazy. She had tiny prom-queen features – she'd look like a brown white-person, like someone who'd overdone it with Man-Tan. But she was obviously beyond the point of practicality. That Lucy's love, her need for Hobie, was that large – it touched me. It was such a dispiriting contrast to the way Sonny had responded to me.
I asked again about Hobie. She had no idea where he'd gone. She thought he'd been with Cleveland, but she'd called the police station and he hadn't been arrested. He had been appearing at home sporadically for weeks now, seemingly arriving only in order to tell her that he couldn't keep living with a white girl. The implication, which Lucy refused to acknowledge, was that he was coming back to find out if she'd left.
'What's he doing? Where do you think he is?' I asked.
‘I don't know. He still goes to school, but after that?'
'What about this bomb? At the ARC? Did he have anything to do with that?'
She turned quickly to the window. She said nothing at first.
'You know about that stuff, right?' she asked. 'That he bought?'
'Right.' The battery acid and sandbags. I knew about that stuff.
'I think he kind of figured out what it was for. Eventually. I mean, nobody told him. He just sort of added things up. I don't know, Seth. He didn't say much.'
'But he didn't plant the bomb, did he? He didn't help plan?'
'Hobie? No. God, no. He couldn't have, could he?'
I reconsidered June's warning. Perhaps she merely meant that if the dominoes fell, Hobie would be in trouble. One arrest would lead to another. I had some powerful vision of Hobie, but it left me as bitter as I was concerned. In the interval, Lucy had started crying once more.
'God, Seth,' she said again, 'what am I going to do?'
Lucy was raised in what used to be called a 'broken home.' Her parents had divorced when she was three. Her father, a well-known lawyer, sent lots of money but appeared infrequently. Her mother was a sort of airy socialite: a martini in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and usually a man nearby to light it. Lucy had come of age in an atmosphere of unfaltering politeness, which as a child left her baffled about whether the air of restraint she always sensed was refinement or indifference. As a teen, she'd tried to find out. She'd run away to a macrobiotic commune in Vermont when she was sixteen. Then, when she was supposed to have been back on track, she took up with Hobie. Lucy told her mother all about her boyfriend, except that he was black, news which my mother-in-law absorbed at once when she came home early one evening during a holiday break and found them fucking away in one of the living-room wing chairs, Lucy's slender freckled legs wrapped around Hobie's medium-brown behind.
In college, as a freshman, Lucy depended on Hobie helplessly. He picked her courses, approved her dresses, gave her books to read. And he relished her slavish attentions. Then every two or three months he would do her wrong. Some girl would take an interest and Hobie would disappear to her dorm room, often for days. Lucy would hang out with me, go to coffee, and beat me at two-handed bridge with an ease I found baffling, since I had not yet recognized the brainpower obscured behind her self-doubts. For the most part, however, she would simply pine incredibly until Hobie returned. There was even one occasion when she stood outside the dormitory where Hobie and the new girl had repaired and moaned for him, a gesture which Hobie was frank enough to admit he had found quite stimulating. Somehow Lucy never seemed to give a thought to saying enough was enough. She groaned even now at the thought of losing him.
'Look, my place will be empty in a few days. Why don't you move in there?'
'God,' she said, 'God, I don't want to be alone, Seth.' The one word, 'alone,' emerged in a tone I sometimes heard in the singing in temple during the High Holidays. An age-old lament, a permanent misery. I held her.
'Then move in today. You'll have company until Monday. That's my induction date. I have to take off for the great North then.' The recollection of June, their plan, the kidnapping recurred. A percussive feeling radiated through me as it had at many moments since the bombing of the ARC. I felt unmoored. The Eddgars' power seemed dominating, because they alone pointed unhesitatingly in a known direction.
'Maybe I'll come, too,' Lucy said. 'To Canada?'
'Sure,' I said. There was nothing else to say, but she took note of my tone, dead of enthusiasm. She stared desolately out the window, trying not to cry. Suddenly, I took hold of Lucy and spoke to her largely as I had spoken to myself since the morning.
'Look. You've got to leave it behind. We both do. All of it. Hobie. Everything else. Everything is changing, every-thing. It's like what we wanted and now we're getting it, and it's happened, and whether it's good or bad, we have to go with it. We just have to go with it.' I gripped her shoulders, much as June had gripped mine, and peered into Lucy's small, bright eyes, hoping to see there some sign, some spark, so that I would know I'd persuaded her and, therefore, myself.
I called my father at work. He was there six days a week, reliably. Although it was Saturday, he never departed before 5:00.
'Dad, you haven't gotten any goofy calls or anything, have you, from some guys out here?'
I heard him calculating, drumming. A symphony soughed faintly from a small console radio he kept behind his desk.
'Calls? You refer to what, Seth?'
'There are some guys here. Nuts. I've seen them around the building. I don't know who they are or what they are. Somebody says they're witches.'
'Vitches!' Back in Kindle County, my father was astounded by such a thing.
'I don't know. Satanists. They call themselves the Dark Revolution. You can't believe the goofballs out here, Dad. Jesus. One of these guys has got an Afro that's literally dyed the colors of the spectrum. I'm not kidding. Red hair, blue hair, purple hair. For-real.'
My father grunted in disbelief.
'Anyway, a guy I know pretty well, he came to me yesterday, strictly on the q.t., and he says these guys, the Dark Revolution guys, have been talking about holding me for ransom because I'm Bernard Weissman's son.'
'Oh, for God's sake,' said my father. Fur Gott sake. 'For God's sake. Have you explained?'
'Sure, I explained. "Not that Weissman. No relation of any kind." I said it all. But I'm not sure this other guy believed me. I just wondered. He said they'd had this plan for like a long time, you know? And they got nervous or something because they heard I'm about to leave? I thought maybe they were going to do something. I don't know.'
'Have you contacted the police?'
'The police? What'll they do?'
'The police will do what the police do. Investigate. Look into matters.'
'Pa, Jesus – if they investigated every person in Damon, California, who said weird things, they'd work from dawn to dusk and never finish going down Campus Boul. That's all I have to do is piss these guys off. The thing for me is just to collect my crap and get out of the country.'
After a pause, my father said, 'That is no solution.'
June sat watching me, near the phone. She was close enough to whisper. She held a notepad and a pen, but she had not added a word yet. Instead, she was faintly smiling. I was well past the dialogue we'd rehearsed, flying free, and feeling a distinct glee in secretly holding the upper hand on my father.
'Look, let's not fight about this. I'll call you in a couple of days.'
'Seth, I want your word that we will have a further discussion before you take any ultimate steps. I expect such a promise.'
'Yeah, I promise. But something has to happen by Monday. Look, Pa. Don't say anything to Mama, okay?'
He snorted. Of course not. In her state. Ransom demands. That is the last thing she needs to hear. 'It would be straight to the asylum,' he said.
'That was great,' said June, as she took the phone. 'What?'
My father's last remark about the asylum was like a stab wound.
'We've talked about this,' June said. 'Your safety will never be in doubt. They'll know you're safe at every moment. It will simply be a question of your release.'
The insanity of this, the debased frantic nature of everything, inside me and elsewhere, swam over me. Eddgar came down to my apartment in a few minutes. It was just as everyone said: he was never present when anything of consequence occurred. June related all the plans. Eddgar sat beside her, brittle as glass, the muscles popping up along his jaw. Occasionally, when something required discussion, the two of them left the room.
'Everything's all right,' June said. He nodded remotely, so that even now you could not say for certain he knew what she was talking about.
Out on the landing, there were footsteps, a heavy thump, before a piffling knock on the door. Eddgar had wheeled with alarm, but when he threw the door back, Lucy was there, whipping her hair out of her eyes and sniffling. She wore her backpack. A huge green duffel, stuffed oozingly, slumped over the threshold. Her pillow was beneath her arm. She considered the three of us, seeming to hold her ground.
'I'm coming to Canada,' she told me.
'we have your son,' the note read. As in the movies, the message was a collage of letters clipped out of the newspaper and pasted on the page. The words had been surprisingly easy to find. A Sears ad in the Chronicle proclaimed, 'we have your size! Sale on Friday.' June had stood over the opened pages. She said, 'Fate.'
It was Saturday night. Lucy was downstairs with Nile; Eddgar, of course, was nowhere to be seen. Assembling the package, June wore yellow rubber gloves. She and Eddgar were deadly earnest about precautions, even though I continued to explain that my parents would never contact the authorities.
'Control the random element,' she said. When June finished, she headed off for Railway Express. Sent by air, the package, a small white gift box, would be delivered to my father's office on Monday before noon. Within, he'd find the note and the mezuzah I had received from our congregation at my bar mitzvah. It was a tiny silver cylinder, emblazoned with a Star of David, containing a parchment scroll on which were written the words Deuteronomy required all Jews to speak each day. I wore it mindlessly, regarding it as an implement of fashion, a Jewish equalizer, so that in gym I would have neckwear like the gentile guys who wore St Christopher's medals and crosses. Yet it didn't seem strange that my parents would recognize this as emblematic of me. That thought, unexpected, was the only tweaking of genuine feelings I experienced. I handed the mezuzah to June with the disembodied emotions that had accompanied much of what I'd done lately. Once again, I was undergoing something momentous, but time just passed, things just happened. Traumhaft. When the word came to mind, I suddenly beamed. June looked at me oddly, but did not wait to ask if I was having second thoughts.
'So he comes back yesterday,' Lucy explained to Michael at dinner on Sunday night, 'and he just starts packing. I mean, Jesus. "Where's my dashiki? Where's my pic." He's running all over. That's all he's saying. And I'm like, "Hobie, what's going on here, talk to me, honey," and it's like I'm not even there. I'm following him around -' She couldn't bear more. She started crying. It was nothing to notice by now. She had been crying constantly for twenty-four hours.
'He said, "You better get out of here, too. The shit's coming down now and it ain't too funky." '
'What did that mean?' I'd heard the story too many times, but in each telling there was something new. 'Cops?'
She had no idea. 'He was in this like for-real sweat? He kept running to the window? And I'm trying to ask him about, you know, us – Honestly. He looked at me! Like I was flipped out completely. Like, who could bother. And I'm like, "Jesus, Hobie, where am I supposed to go, what am I supposed to do?" And it's -' Weeping, she couldn't find words to relay his indifference.
'Where is he?' Michael asked. 'Does he know where you are?' She flapped both arms uselessly. Michael, for his part, was somewhat better. He still looked desolate and bleary, but he appeared more contained.
'I don't know. Sort of. I told him, "I think I'll help Seth get up to Canada." ' She looked at me. 'Do you think he'll call?'
'No,' I said. ‘I don't.' I was well past the point of humoring her. It would be some drive north – honking geese and a blubbering hippie. Not that I wouldn't have welcomed the chance to see
Hobie before I left tomorrow. Except for the grimy twisted bit between the Eddgars and my father- the direst secret, they warned, which I would have been far too ashamed to share anyway – my plans remained more or less as they'd been. The Eddgars would collect the ransom; I would leave.
Michael and Lucy and I were drinking wine, supposedly celebrating my last night before becoming a fugitive of the state. We'd lit a candle, stuck in a Chianti bottle, and picked at a crab and a big sourdough bread that Lucy had bought the day before, preparing for a sentimental reunion with Hobie. Our conversation never got much beyond Lucy's tortured recollection of how those plans went awry. Somehow the subject offered heartsore reminders to each of us of the failures of romance.
'What a trio we are,' I said suddenly. There was a bedtime story I had read a dozen times to Nile. One animal's blind, one's deaf, another can't speak. They find each other and thrive. They form a band. But I always closed the book thinking, What a wretched depleted community. I couldn't help myself. I laughed out loud. 'Love's wasted remains.'
Michael received my remark with his worn, silent smile and cleaned his plate.
By the time the late news came on, Lucy was asleep on the sofa. I tried once or twice to revive her, to share my amazement over what was taking place. On Saturday, at the New Haven rally in support of Bobby Seale, demonstration leaders had called for a national student strike to protest the war. Nixon had denounced the campus radicals as 'bums' but the idea of a strike was spreading. Eleven college newspapers across the country – including the ones at Princeton, Sarah Lawrence, and Damon – had endorsed the plan.
In Cambodia, on the other hand, the invading U S troops were finding few signs of a North Vietnamese presence.
As a base of 'operations,' as they called it, June had selected the Campus Travel Motel, located down on the east side of Damon, where Campus Boul met the highway. From there our business would be done and my departure made. I was supposed to meet June there around noon on Monday.
That morning, I went upstairs to see Nile off for school.' Shake,' I said. He grabbed my thumb handover-style, an obedient trainee in the rev. June had begged me not to say goodbye to him. She couldn't endure a scene. I explained only that I was taking a trip and wouldn't be around after school. 'I'm going to send you lots of postcards.'
'I like candy,' Nile said, somewhat solemnly, as if I didn't know.
I pitched my bags into the Bug and drove down to Robson's. I had seen Sonny's little white waitress outfit in the closet, the stiff apron and white shoes inspiring a few half-humorous overtures about playing nurse. But it was disconcerting to see her dressed that way. It made it seem as if years had passed, instead of a few weeks. Her hair was bundled back into a net, and a little white cap, a crepe tiara, sat atop her like some nesting bird. She lit up when she saw me push through the door, so that unruly emotions suddenly overcame me as I drew up to her at the old lunch counter.
'D-Day.' I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans, for lack of anything else to do.
‘I know.' She'd been counting of course. ‘I was afraid you'd gone already. I wish you'd let me call. Gus, I'm going outside.'
Behind the lunch counter, Gus wiped a hand on his greasy apron and nodded without other comment. He was sucking the last from a cigarette. She grabbed her jacket off a peg in the back and walked me out the rear through the commotion of the kitchen. The floor was red concrete and grimy. 'Right back,' she yelled in response to someone's protest, and clanked through the back grate into the alley. The refuse of the restaurant – melon husks and thick freezer bags from french fries – was piled beside the Dumpster, rotting fragrantly in the sun. Down one doorway, a cat sprawled on its back on a wooden step, waving its paw in the sunshine in a moment of feline languor, invulnerable and relaxed, seeming to enjoy some memory buried in the DN A of its foregone glory as a tiger.
Once we were alone, Sonny came up and hugged me, held on just to be close, as if there weren't any time or differences between us. The feel of her body, so familiar, crushed me in a vise of difficult emotion.
'You waited to the last minute,' she said.
'Yeah, I've been jailbait for about an hour. There's some recruiting officer looking at my name on a list, checking the traffic reports for the highway, and hoping like hell he doesn't have to fill out all the goddamn paperwork.' Amid all the uncertainties of the moment, this decision still felt inalterably correct.
We talked about the Peace Corps. Her designation had come through with unexpected speed. She'd be leaving for Manila within the next month. Her assignment was at a family-planning center in the north part of the country. She spoke without notable enthusiasm. It was already a particular place, a job. Signing up, she'd envisioned the bush, the jungle, contact with timeless, indigenous cultures. But the descriptions of the center brought to mind those teeming Asian cities – Bombay, Bangkok: desperation, debasement, filth, an entire population longing for the corruption of the rich. For the time being, she seemed less certain that in journeying ten thousand miles she was going to find adventure or truth, whatever it was she thought she'd miss hanging out with me.
'It'll be great,' I said.
‘I hope so. Graeme is quoting Horace: "They change their clime, but not their minds… who rush across the sea." ' She shrugged, somewhat melancholic. She had on white tights and clunky white Earth shoes. Her coat, probably Graeme's, a black jeans jacket, covered her hands.
'Guess what?' I said, 'Groovy's hitting the road with me.'
'Really?'
'She and Hobie are splitsville. You know, she's being a pal. Moral support. That kind of thing.'
'Right, moral support,' said Sonny. 'She's been wanting to get next to you forever.' 'Bullshit.'
'Hey, women can tell this stuff.'
It was making her happy, I knew. This kind of flirting. Pretending I already had a happy, separate life. 'I'm just a ride, Sonny.' 'What about your parents?'
‘I think I've worked it out,' I said stoically. She had lived with me too long, however, not to register the change of tempo. I was helpless as she measured me with one of her dark, searching looks. She understood more about me, I realized, than I'd ever really figured out about her.
'Are you up to something, baby?'
'Something,' I answered. It was calling me 'baby' that did it. I had planned to be remote, to guard absolutely the secret, as the Eddgars insisted. With Lucy, for example, I had said we were leaving from the motel in case the army recruiters came looking for me, a silly fiction, since by every account there would be no hunt for me for weeks, until my name was reported to the FBI.
'Cross your heart?' I asked.
She stood back, wary already.
'I'm being kidnapped.' I smirked, in spite of the sick breach that opened in me at the mere thought of the next step.
'Kidnapped?' She zeroed in quickly. 'What does that mean? What are you telling them?'
'Don't ask,' I said. 'You wouldn't believe it.'
She grabbed my sleeve. 'Is Hobie involved with this?'
'Forget it. It's cool, really. It's a bit of a mad stunt, but it's safe for everyone. Just keep it to yourself, okay?' Now that she had hold of me, she did not let go. She came close again.
'Seth, don't go crazy on me.'
'It's the times,' I said. 'It's in the air.' I didn't say a word of blame about her, but we both knew.
'God,' she said, 'why do I feel so terrible? Have I been really lousy to you?'
'The end could have been better. But it's like the stories I make up. It's usually the case.'
'I like your stories,' she said, nestled against me.
Here we were again, like that cry lost in the fog: I want to be with you; I can't. I had no understanding of what tethered her inside herself, only that she was straining against it, and that, however faintly, I was not completely without hope.
'Twenty-five years from now you may feel real bad about this.'
‘I feel real bad now.' She took a deep breath. 'Call me as soon as you're safe. You promise?' 'For sure.'
‘I want to know just where you are.'
'In case you change your mind?'
She smiled faintly.
'It's not too late,' I said.
‘I know.' It was the closest she had been yet.
'I'll be waiting.' I walked on that observation. I had my movie dream that I'd hear her racing up from behind. But she didn't. Not yet. I turned to check, to wave. The best I got was that she lingered amid the garbage cans in a patch of sun, and tapped the spot over her heart.
At 10 a.m. precisely, we placed the call to my father's office. The terror that raveled his voice was extraordinary. I realized again how close it lurked beneath the surface of his life. 'Oh my God, Seth.'
'Dad, I'm all right. Really, I'm all right.' 'Where are you?'
‘I can't tell you. They're right here. It's been a little wild.'
'Okay, that's enough,' June said, beside me, loud enough to be heard. The motel room was dismal, clean but otherwise on its last legs. It must originally have been war construction, a barracks perhaps. The walls were clad at half-height in plastic sandalwood-colored paneling, presumably to hide the gouges. June had drawn the heavy green drapes.
"They understand that they have the wrong guy,' I told my father. 'I mean, they do now. I finally got them to take me over to the library this morning. I showed them Bernard Weissman in Who's Who. And your biography in American Economists. It took a while to find something that had your son's name.'
'They have let you go?'
'Not exactly.'
'Okay,' said June. 'So he's alive. He's breathing. He's fine.' She'd grabbed the phone. Her voice was hoarsened in a way that nearly made me laugh. After all her talk of Drama School, I had expected an inspired performance – something Method, wholly unique. Instead, she seemed simply to have borrowed the manner of the gritty radio dramas – The Shadow or Johnny Dollar – which were still on the air when I was a boy. But she'd correctly calculated the effect. This was, after all, real life, where the overdone suggested someone sinisterly bent beyond normal restraint. My father was terrified.
'Who is this?' he cried. I was poised, not far from the earpiece.
'This is me. This is the Dark Revolution. This is the voice of the truth. Okay? Next time I call, I'm going to tell you what you can do to make us let him go. First thing, you have to listen to the rules. And obey the rules. Rule One: No phone calls over one minute. And your minute is up right now. Bye-bye.'
After she'd clapped down the phone, my father must have sat in his office for some time, perhaps checking his own pulse until he could re-establish his normally orderly thoughts. Perhaps he stared at his coarse, pallid face reflected on the glass of one of his diplomas or citations. Certainly, as always, he talked to himself. The world, he thought, had ceased being a reasoning place. People roamed like beasts, seized by unpredictable emotion, giving vent to wretched fantasy. Waking or sleeping – daylight was the only membrane that separated him now from the turbulence of dreams.
But a fragment of him must have been contented and serene. He had spent so many years preparing himself. He had always known he would see it all again.
June called back in fifteen minutes to tell him they wanted ransom. 'You have money. You can pay.'
‘I am a university professor. I am a poor man.' I heard that cunning tone I'd listened to at store counters a thousand times, as he criticized quality, the price, hoping for some edge with which to bargain. With a bitter smile, I had predicted exactly what he would do. And even so, something in me crumbled. There was no hope. 'What am I to pay? How? You understand. I am not that Weissman.' He went on that way another instant before she interrupted.
'You want to know where your son is now? You have any neighbors with a dog? That's where your son is. He has a dog's choke collar around his throat. It's attached to the fucking wall. His hands are manacled. So are his feet. He sits when we say, he stands when we say. He gets to pee every four hours. Maybe we'll let him go next year. Maybe the year after. I don't care. Dog food's cheap. Do you understand me? Now it's your choice. If that's what you want, you just have to say it. That's Rule Number Two. You tell me what you want. Do you want that? You want us to treat your son like some mangy, flea-ridden, shedding, dogshit-shitting dog we'll do that. You just say. Is that what you'd like? I want to hear you say that. Come on. Follow the rules.'
I had never heard my father cry before. He emitted a stifled wheeze, then his voice shattered. I bent over completely and covered my head.
'I want $20,000. That's all. Just twenty. We went into this figuring $2 million. It's fucked up, okay, but we have expenses. This whole fucked-up operation wasn't cheap. We have mouths to feed. We have a lot of people who are a lot of disappointed. Okay? And we need time to make some nice new plans. Now either you help us with that or we won't be helping you. Okay? That's a rule too. Dig?'
He was crying too hard to answer.
'No police, FBI, kiddie cops. Pinkertons. No one. Okay? We set the conditions,' said June. She nodded as she held the receiver in the wan light of the cheap lamp. I had sunk to one of the beds and could no longer hear him. 'You pay this sum and he's free. Subject to conditions: We don't get caught. This never happened. That's how it goes. I don't trust you, you don't trust me. So we set the conditions.'
What conditions? he must have asked.
'Next call.' June smacked down the phone. She closed her eyes to grab hold of herself, to find her real life, before she looked down at me.
'It's going fine,' she said.