The Evening News (15 page)

A white car pulled suddenly to the curb next to us. The driver rolled down the window, then leaned out. “You fucking punks,” the man said, veins bulging in his temple. “Go back where you came from, you goddamn fucking punks.”

Ted and I ignored him. Stacey walked closer to the car. “There's a war in Asia,” she said. “Does that mean anything to you? At this moment we are killing innocent women and children.”

“You don't belong here, get out of this city, you fucking punks.” He continued to drive next to us as we walked.

“Blind pig,” Stacey shouted.

We turned a corner. The car drove straight.

Ted stopped. He knew the map. “The garage should be on this next block,” he said. I looked and couldn't see the group that had left ahead of us. We'd left in staggered groups so we wouldn't attract too much attention. The garage was where we'd decided we would all gather and wait.

“Let's go then,” Stacey said. She walked quickly.

The others were inside the empty garage, waiting. Some
huddled in one corner. Others leaned against the pillars and walls.

“You know the password?” someone said.

Ted raised his fist. We laughed. Stacey went over to the women. Ted turned and asked me for a cigarette.

“I didn't bring any.” I shook my head. My mouth was very dry. I wouldn't have wanted to smoke a cigarette anyway.

Someone called for quiet. The last group trickled in. “Hey, we need to send out scouts. Who wants to volunteer?”

“How far away is the intersection?” someone said.

“Two blocks. Act nonchalant.”

There was laughter. Then others told everyone to quiet down again. “Hey, let's not get our asses busted in a damn garage.” For a while everyone whispered.

I walked the length of the garage. I couldn't stand still. Stacey came over to me and asked if I was trying to escape. She was joking. I said I wish I could escape.

“So do I,” she said. She smiled, and then the scouts returned, and we joined the others huddling in the corner.

The scouts said they counted seven buses filled with policemen. By the park, east of the intersection. Someone asked if they had seen pigs on horses. They said they hadn't. “Seven fucking buses,” someone said.

“Well,” a boy said. “Are we ready? Is it time yet to go through with this?”

“Seize the time, off the slime.”

“Stop the war.”

“Out of the kitchens and into the streets.”

“For Uncle Ho.”

We moved out of the garage. Some of the others were already there at the intersection. They were crossing carefully, moving back and forth. The traffic wasn't very heavy. The bright headlights shone as the cars drove up the slight hill.

“Let's move,” Ted shouted. I shouted something. Everyone laughed.

It was difficult walking in front of speeding cars. You did
not know if they were going to stop or not. We managed to slow the traffic's flow, but we didn't completely stop it. I realized that at various points around the city other groups were on the streets too. We were part of something that was bigger than any of us. History. I felt high. At different times we broke out into different chants, but I can't remember what it was we chanted. The automobiles weaved slowly around the bricks some had brought and dropped. Some of us brought carpet tacks, for the tires, to give them flats. We spread them on the street like children feeding chickens. The tacks scattered to the curbs and stuck to the bottoms of everyone's sneakers and boots. Some drivers shouted at us. Some tapped their horns and raised their fist in support. Some drivers pretended to hit us, but then at the last moment they screeched their brakes and swerved away.

Then the police arrived. The traffic slowed to watch. We grew quiet, cautious. The police approached us from the west on three-wheel motorcycles, sirens blaring. Someone yelled, “Rush them.” “Tip them over.” “Knock them down.” We turned, ready for the charge. They drew closer. We hesitated. All the men on the tiny cycles were black.

We stood still. “Stay in your groups,” someone shouted.

The motorcycles began driving around us, forming a loop, herding us like we were sheep. There were only ten or twelve of them, several hundred of us. We could have rushed them easily, knocking them and their little three-wheelers to the ground. We could have used their toy motorcycles to block the intersection, as a barricade between us and the rushing traffic. But because they were black we didn't know what to do. Whoever sent them after us knew what he was doing. We held out our arms, some of us calling out to them, “Brother?” They didn't nod or smile or raise a fist. Instead they drove us into a tighter and tighter circle, like dogs who knew we were sheep who were confused. The dogs herded us across the six wide lanes into the small park.

When we turned and looked at the park we saw the lines of policemen, on foot, coming up out of the darkness toward us, swinging their clubs. All of them were white. The slaps of their clubs against their hands filled the early morning air. Then the buses arrived and more white dogs poured out into the intersection. Then the black dogs disappeared. We realized what had happened. Some of us then tried to run.

A boy was clubbed until he tripped. Then the pigs beat his back and head. Two boys ran across the intersection and were nearly hit by a truck. The pigs chased them and caught one by his long blonde hair. He was thrown down to the sidewalk. A woman's knee was clubbed and buckled backward. The blonde boy's head bounced against the pavement. The crowd turned in on itself. From the center you could only watch. All around was the sound of sticks hitting meat.

We were surrounded. A woman who did nothing was hit full in the face. She clutched her face, then fell to her knees and vomited. Blood ran from her face into her vomit. I was clubbed from behind, in the legs, across the calves. The pain surprised me.

Then we stopped moving. I held my sides and tried to catch my breath. From behind the white dome of the Capitol, the sun started to come up.

It was finished. With the exception of the two buses parked across the street, the six lanes were unblocked. Now the motorists slowing down to stare at what was happening in the park clogged the intersection, and the traffic trickled through more slowly than when we were on the street.

I looked at the boy whose forehead had been clubbed. He was trying to joke with the girl with the blue kerchief. Her mouth made a hard line. I looked for Stacey but could see only her back. I decided not to walk over to her. Then someone shouted for us to go through our pockets and wallets and to tear up everything we didn't want the pigs to get their hands on. Telephone numbers, addresses, the names of friends. Anything
that might incriminate anyone. I watched a boy spill out a pocketful of pills.

“Get in your affinity groups,” a woman shouted. “Segregate by sex, and make sure you get in the same jail cell as your group. Keep track of the others. People, remember they are your brothers and sisters.”

I walked over to Ted. He was my affinity group.

“Lou,” he said. He made a V of his fingers and waved them in front of his mouth. I told him I hadn't brought my cigarettes. He said, “Shit.” He kicked the ground with the toe of his boot. I turned and looked at the rows of policemen.

One policeman chewed a wad of gum and rhythmically cracked his club into his hand. Another rocked slowly on his heels. Two others pointed and laughed. They had spread out their formation. Now they stood an arm's distance apart.

“Well, what do you think?” Ted said. He was smoking a cigarette.

“Let me have a drag,” I said.

Ted laughed. “I guess we're waiting for the buses. Either that or they're planning on beating us all to death.” He laughed again. “You didn't get hit, did you?”

“No,” I said. I handed him back the cigarette.

“There's a woman over there,” he pointed, “who got hit pretty fucking bad.” He dropped the cigarette, then ground it into the dirt.

I nodded. The first bus arrived. The circle of police opened toward the bus. One by one we were taken and told to stand facing the bus. Then we were frisked. There were women guards to frisk the women.

I walked toward the opening. “Was Stacey on that bus?”

“Who's Stacey?” a girl asked.

I described her. The girl shook her head.

“I don't know, man,” she said.

I walked back toward Ted. Some of the groups in line for the buses put their hands on top of their heads. POW's. Ted
stood with his arms folded, still kicking the dirt. “Look,” he said. Half the policemen were walking back to their buses.

“Want to try and run for it?” Ted asked. He was serious.

The second bus for the prisoners was pulling up now. Some of the groups were lying on the ground, passively resisting.

“I don't know about you,” Ted said, “but I didn't come all the way out here for a bus ride. There's got to be twenty, twenty-five more spots where people are demonstrating. The pigs can't bust them all.”

I took a deep breath, then nodded.

“We'll run together, then apart.” He drew the lines in his palm with his fingers, then made an X at the point where we'd meet.

I nodded again. Ted began to move.

I was right behind him. At first we were walking evenly, blending in with the groups that were lining up for the bus. Then Ted dropped to one knee. He pretended to lace his boot. I squatted next to him.

“You're sure.”

“Yes.”

“Then let's go,” he said, standing. “Now.” He broke for the line of policemen. I ran beside him, and then I cut to my right, and Ted was no longer in my field of vision. One pig shouted and another swung his club, but I leaped past them and was running toward the trees and bushes, deep into the park. I didn't think anything was behind. The horse approached me from my left. As soon as I could see it I knew I was caught. I ran to my right. I might have shouted. It came alongside me effortlessly, quickly. My head filled with its smell. In the stirrup I saw the black boot. Light reflected off something. I could hear the animal's terrible breathing and the sound of its hooves on the ground and the pounding of my own breath and heart, and then I felt the club, across my back, and I think I was somehow relieved as I stumbled forward and threw up my hands to block the club as it swung down furiously
toward my face. I turned my head. I felt a shock of pain and light, a sudden blinding whiteness, and I know I made a sound then.

I was too numb to feel the other blows, from the two pigs on foot who had chased me. I was relieved because I understood that they could only beat me, and the beating didn't crush what else I felt inside. When they were tired of hitting me, they bound my hands and lifted me from the grass. I tried to look at my second shirt to see if there was any blood on it. I couldn't focus my eyes. Then I was aware that the side of my face felt very wet, and then I realized just how bad I was bleeding.

Ted escaped, though he was arrested later at another action in another part of the city. They put him in the Coliseum because by then the municipal jails had overflowed. In all, that day over ten thousand were jailed. Stacey had gone on the first bus with the other women like I'd thought. She told me later that she learned a great deal from the experience of being imprisoned. She said the women tried to talk and relate to their guards, and inside the cells everyone held hands and sang songs of protest.

My head had to be shaved. They stitched my wounds closed. For a while I had dizzy spells and blinding headaches, and I still have some problems with language and can't hear clearly from one ear.

I don't know what we accomplished or didn't accomplish. I realize now that some things have changed, that some things haven't.

Now we are scattered like the tacks.

“Gloria in excelsis Deo,”
Peter said as he steered his squeaking Chevy down Hampton Boulevard, a Winston bouncing on his lip. Glory be to God on high. It was Sunday morning, Memorial Day weekend, the beginning of the tourist season. Most of Norfolk's residents and visitors were eating breakfast or still in bed, asleep. Lena and August, who had flown in from Chicago on the discount airline the night before, sat next to Peter on the car's blanketed front seat. Lena wore a black hat and was as thin as a bird. Gus was gray and as round as a house cat.
“Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.”
And on earth peace to men of good will. The old Chevy groaned and rumbled down the street, tires delving into every pothole. From behind a large cloud the sun tried to shine.

“I'm glad my boy still knows his prayers,” Lena said, patting Peter's bony knee. He was wearing blue jeans and an open-necked blue shirt.

“You need new shocks,” August announced. His hands firmly gripped the dashboard. “We'll never make it to church in one piece. This is worse than a roller-coaster ride.”

Peter glanced at his parents, exhaled a thick stream of smoke, shook his head, and smiled.
“Laudamus te. Benedicimus te. Adoramus te.”
We praise Thee. We bless Thee. We adore Thee. Pleased with himself, Peter downshifted as the car neared a red light. So far the visit was going well. He
idled in neutral. And he'd do whatever he could to make things stay that way.
“Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,”
he said, nudging his mother. I confess to almighty God. Then Peter beat his chest three times and said,
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”
Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. The Chevy lurched forward as the light turned to green.

“My Petie,” Lena laughed. “He's giving us the whole Mass.” She turned from her husband's frown and faced her son. “So you're a regular parishioner at this church, Petie?”

“Sure, Mamma.” Peter flicked his cigarette butt out his open window and looked away.