The next blast of pig bullets shook the green house on its foundations, blew a hole the size of a fist in the back of Sancho Clemenza’s skull, and ripped away two of James Xavier Toombs’s fingers. Mary heard Lord Jack shouting: “No surrender! No surrender!” One of the Storm Fronters threw a stick of dynamite with a sparking fuse, and the house next door exploded in a geyser of fire, wood, and glass. A vehicle of some kind was coming along the street: an armored car, Mary saw with a jolt of horror. The snout of a machine gun spat tracer bullets, and the slugs tore through the punctured walls like meteors. Two of those bullets hit Akitta Washington in the remains of the kitchen, and sprayed his blood across the refrigerator. Another stick of dynamite was thrown, destroying the Steinfeld house in a thunderclap. Flames leapt high, waves of black smoke rolling across the neighborhood. The armored car stopped, hunched on the street like a black beetle, fiery tracers spitting from its machine gun. Mary heard Janette sob, “The bastards! The bastards!” and Janette rose up in the flickering red light and yanked the pin from a second grenade. She threw her arm back to toss the grenade through the window, tears running down her face, and suddenly the room was full of flying wood splinters and ricocheting tracers and Janette Snowden was knocked backward. The grenade fell from her fingers, and Mary watched as if locked in a fever dream as the live grenade rolled across the blood-spattered floorboards.
Mary had a second or two in which her brain was seized up. Reach for the grenade, or get the fuck out? Janette’s body was jittering on the floor. The grenade was still rolling.
Out.
The thought screamed. Mary stood up, crouched low, and ran for the door with cold sweat bursting from the pores of her flesh.
She heard the grenade thunk against the baseboard. In that instant she lifted her hands to shield her face, and she realized she should have shielded her unborn baby instead.
Surprisingly, she did not hear the grenade explode. She was aware only of a great heat lapping against her midsection, like the sun on a particularly fierce day. There was a feeling of lightness, of stepping outside her body and soaring upward. And then the sensation of gravity caught her again and wrenched her back to earth, and she opened her eyes in the upstairs hallway of the burning house, a hole in the bedroom’s flaming wall and much of the ceiling collapsed and on fire. Somebody was trying to help her up. She saw a gaunt, bearded face and a ponytail. Edward. “…Up, get up!” he was saying, blood streaking his forehead and cheeks like war paint. She could barely hear him for the buzz in her ears. “Can you get up?”
“God,” she said, and three seconds after that God answered by filling her body with pain. She began to cry, blood drooling from her mouth. She pressed her hands against the swell of her baby, and her fingers sank into a crimson swamp.
It was hatred that got her to her feet. Nothing but hatred that could make her grit her teeth and haul herself up as blood streamed down her thighs and dripped to the floor. “Hurt bad,” she told Edward, but he was pulling her through the flames and she went with him, docile in her agony. Bullets were still ripping through the Swiss-cheese walls, smoke thick in the air. Mary had lost her gun. “Gun,” she said. “Gun.” Edward scooped up a revolver from the floor, near Gary Leister’s outstretched hand, and she closed her fist on its warm grip. She stepped on something: the body of CinCin Omara, the cameo face unrecognizable as anything that had once been human. James Xavier Toombs lay on the floor, crouched and clutching at a stomach wound with his eight fingers. He looked at them with glazed eyes, and Mary thought she heard him gasp, “No surrender.”
“Jack! Where’s Jack?” she asked Edward, clinging to him.
He shook his head. “Gotta get out!” He picked up James Xavier Toombs’s automatic. “Back door! You ready?”
She made a noise that meant yes, her mouth full of blood. Upstairs, some of the ammunition in the arsenal was starting to explode, the noise like Independence Day firecrackers. The back door was already hanging open. A dead pig lay on his back at the bottom of the steps. Jack had passed this way, Mary knew. Where was Didi? Still in the house? She had no time to think about anyone else. Smoke was billowing from the burning houses, cutting visibility to within a few yards. Mary could see the white tongues of flashlights licking at the smoke. “You with me?” Edward asked her, and she nodded.
They started across the back lawn, through the low-lying smoke. Gunshots were still popping, tracers flying through the haze. Edward scrabbled over a fence into the alley, and pulled Mary over. The pain made her think she was about to leave her guts behind, but she had no choice; she kept going, fighting back the darkness that tried to drag her down. Together they staggered along the alley. Blue lights were flashing, sirens awail. They went over another fence and crashed into garbage cans. Then they pressed up against the wall of a house, Mary shivering with pain and about to pass out. “Don’t move. I’ll be back,” Edward promised, and he ran ahead to find a way through the pig blockade.
Mary sat with her legs outstretched. She released a moan, but she clenched her teeth against a scream. Where was Jack? Alive or dead? If he was dead, so was she. She leaned over and threw up, getting rid of blood and pizza.
And then she heard a scraping noise, and she looked to her right at a pair of shined black shoes.
“Mary Terrell,” the man said.
She looked up at him. He wore a dark suit and a blue striped tie, his chiseled face all but obscured by the smoke. There was a gleaming silver badge on his lapel. He held a snub-nosed .38 in his right hand, pointed somewhere between them.
“On your feet,” the pig commanded.
“Fuck you,” she said.
He reached for her arm, her hand sunken in the bloody mess of her belly.
She let him grasp her with his slimy pig hand. And as she allowed him to haul her up, incredible pain bringing tears to her eyes, she lifted the revolver that had been hidden beside her and she shot him in the face.
Mary saw his jaw explode. It was a wonderful sight. His gun went off right in her ear, and the bullet whined about three inches from her own face. His arm was out of control, the gun whipping around. More bullets fired, one into the ground and two into the air. Mary shot him again, this time in the throat. She saw the animal fear in his eyes, and she heard him whine. Air and blood bubbled from his wound. He staggered back, desperately trying to aim at her, but his fingers twitched and lost the gun. The pig went down on his knees, and Mary Terror stood over him and jammed the revolver’s barrel against his forehead. She pulled the trigger and saw him shudder as if stuck with an electric prod. The gun clicked: no more bullets.
The pig’s torn face wore a crooked, bleeding leer, one side of his jaw hanging by tough red strands of muscle. She started to pick up his gun, but the pain stopped her. She was too weak to even smash him in the nose. She gathered bloody saliva in her mouth, and she spewed it across his cheeks.
“Mary? I think I’ve found a—” Edward stopped. “Jesus!” he said, looking at the man’s ruined face. He lifted his gun and started to squeeze the trigger.
“No,” Mary told him. “No. Let him suffer.”
Edward paused, then he lowered the gun.
“Suffer,” Mary whispered, and she leaned forward and kissed the pig’s sweating forehead. He had thin brown hair, going bald. The pig made a gasping, clucking sound from his gaping throat. “Let’s split!” Edward urged. Mary turned away from the pig, and she and Edward staggered off into the smoke, one of her hands pressed into her stomach as if to keep her insides from sliding out.
“Suffer,” Mary Terror said, sitting in the olive-green van with Drummer. She rolled down her window and smelled the air. The reek of smoke and burning houses was all gone, but she remembered it. She and Edward had crawled past a parked pig car in the dense haze, a couple of pigs standing less than ten feet away and holding pump shotguns as they talked about kicking hippie ass. An abandoned concession stand four blocks north, at the edge of a weeded-up park, had a loose board. Mary and Edward had h
idden there for over twenty-six hours, sleeping except when they had to kick the rats away from Mary’s blood. Then Edward had gone out and found a pay phone, and he’d called some friends in Manhattan who owned a militant bookstore. Two hours after that, Mary awoke in an apartment listening to voices argue the fact that she was getting blood on everything and she couldn’t stay there. Somebody came in with a medical bag, antiseptic, hypodermics, and shiny instruments. “Fucking mess,” she heard him say as he removed the shrapnel and wood shards with forceps.
“My baby,” Mary had whispered. “I’m going to have a baby.”
“Yeah. Right. Eddie, give her another swig of the rum.”
She drank the liquid fire. “Where’s Jack? Tell Jack I’m going to have his baby.”
Edward’s voice: “Mary? Mary, listen to me. A friend of mine’s going to take you on a trip. Take you to a house where you can rest. Is that all right?”
“Yes. I’m going to have a baby. Oh, I’m hurting. I’m hurting.”
“You won’t hurt long. Listen, Mary. You’re going to stay at this house until you can get around, but you can’t stay there very long. Only a week or so. Okay?”
“Underground railroad,” she’d answered, her eyes closed. “I can dig it.”
“I have to leave now. Can you hear me?”
“Hear you.”
“I have to leave. My friend is going to take care of you. I’ve paid him some money. I’ve got to go right now. Okay?”
“ ’Kay,” she’d said. She had drifted to sleep, and that was the last time she’d seen Edward Fordyce.
Near Baltimore there was the gas station bathroom where Mary had delivered the dead infant girl from a belly held together with three hundred and sixty-two ragged stitches. There was a house in Bowens, Maryland, near the edge of Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, where Mary had lived for a week on lentil soup with a man and woman who never talked. At night the shrieks of small animals being devoured in the swamp sounded to her like crying babies.
The couple had let her read a New York Times story about the shootout. It was a difficult thing to read. Edward, Lord Jack, and Bedelia Morse had escaped. James Xavier Toombs had been captured, alive but badly wounded. He would never tell about the weeping lady, Mary knew. James Xavier Toombs had a hole inside himself, and he could retreat into it, close the lid, and recite haiku in his inner sanctum.
The worst night, though, was when she dreamed about herself giving a baby boy to Lord Jack. It was terrible, because when it was over she was alone again.
“I was born right there. See it?” Mary picked up Drummer’s bassinet. But Drummer was asleep, his pink eyelids fluttering and the pacifier gripped in his mouth. She kissed his forehead, a gentler kiss than she’d once given a suffering pig, and she returned Drummer’s bassinet to the floorboard.
There were ghosts at 1105 Elderman Street. She could hear them singing songs of love and revolution with voices that would be young forever. James Xavier Toombs had been killed in a riot at Attica; she wondered if his ghost had returned here, and joined those of the other sleeping children. Linden, New Jersey. July 1, 1972. As Cronkite would have said: That was the way it was.
She felt very old. Tomorrow she would feel young again. She drove back the sixteen miles to the McArdle Travel Inn outside Piscataway, and when she cried a little bit no one saw.
4
A Crack in Clay
WHEN THE DOOR OPENED, LAURA THRUST THE HALF-KILLED bottle of sangria into Mark Treggs’s face. “Here. I brought you a present.”
He blinked, stunned, while behind him Rose stood up from the beanbag chair in which she’d been sitting, watching television. The two kids had been playing on the floor, the little girl with her Barbie and the boy with his GoBots; they stopped, too, and stared up at the visitor with wide eyes.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Laura asked, her breath smelling of sweet red wine.
“No. Please go away.” He started to push the door shut.
Laura put her hand against it. “I don’t know anybody here. It’s a bitch drinking alone. Don’t be rude, okay?”
“I don’t have anything else to tell you.”
“I know. I just want to be with somebody. Is that so bad?”
He looked at his wristwatch; Mickey Mouse was on the dial. “It’s almost nine o’clock.”
“Right. Time to do some serious drinking.”
“If you don’t leave,” Treggs said, “I’m going to have to call the police.”
“Would you really?” she asked him. A silence stretched, and Laura saw that he would not.
“Oh, let her in, Mark!” Rose stood behind him. “What’s it going to hurt?”
“I think she’s drunk.”
“No, not yet.” Laura smiled thinly. “I’m working on it. Come on, I won’t stay long. I just need to talk to somebody, all right?”
Rose Treggs pushed her husband aside and opened the door to admit her. “We never closed our door in anybody’s face, and we won’t start now. Come on in, Laura.”
Laura crossed the threshold with her bottle of wine. “Hi,” she said to the kids, and the little boy said, “Hi” but the little girl just stared at her. “Close the door, Mark, you’re letting the cold in!” Rose told him, and he muttered something deep in his beard and shut the door against the night.
“We figured you’d gone back to Atlanta,” Rose said.
Laura eased down onto the sofa. Springs jabbed her butt. “Not much to go back to.” She uncapped the sangria and drank from the bottle. The last time she’d drunk anything straight from a bottle, it was half-price beer back at the University of Georgia. “I thought I wanted to be alone. I guess I was wrong.”
“Isn’t anybody going to worry about you?”
“I left a message for my husband. He’s o-u-t. Out.” Laura took another swig. “Called Carol and told her where I was. Carol’s my friend. Thank God for friends, huh?”
“Okay, rug rats,” Treggs said to the children. “Time for bed.” They instantly began to caterwaul a protest, but Treggs got them up and moving.
“Are you the lady whose baby got taken?” the little boy asked her.
“Yes, I am.”
“Mark Junior!” the elder Mark said. “Come on, bedtime!”
“My dad thinks you’re wearing a wire,” the boy told her. “See my GoBot?” He held it up for her inspection, but his father grasped his arm and pulled him toward the hallway. “Nighty-night!” Mark Junior had time to say. A door slammed, rather hard.
“Bright child,” Laura said to Rose. “I’m not, though. Wearing a wire, I mean. Why would I be?”
“Mark’s a little suspicious of people. Goes back to his Berkeley days, I guess. You know, the pigs were putting wire mikes on kids posing as radicals and taping everything that was said at SDS meetings. The FBI got a lot of files on people that way.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t into politics that much. I mostly just, like, hung out and did macramé.”
“I was into politics.” Another sip of the red wine. Her tongue felt furry. “I thought we could change the world with flowers and candles. With love.” She said it as if uncertain what it meant anymore. “That was pretty damned stupid, wasn’t it?”
“It was where we were and what we were about,” Rose said. “It was a good fight.”
“We lost,” Laura answered. “Read any newspaper, and you can see we lost. Damn…if all that energy couldn’t change the world, nothing can.”
“Right on, sad to say.” Rose grasped the bottle of sangria, and Laura let her have it. “Ancient history doesn’t go well with red wine. I’ll make you some tea. Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.” Laura nodded, light-headed, and Rose walked into the kitchen.
After a while Mark Treggs came back into the front room. Laura was watching a movie on TV: Barefoot in the Park, with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, pre-Hanoi. Treggs settled himself into a chair opposite her and crossed his long, gangly legs. “You ought to go home,” he told her. “There’s no
point in your hanging around Chattanooga.”
“I’ll go in the morning. Soon as I get some rest.” Which was going to be next to impossible, she knew. Every time she closed her eyes she thought she heard a baby crying and the wail of sirens.
“I can’t help you. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“I know. You’ve already told me that.”
“I’m telling you again.” He steepled his thin fingers together, and watched her with his owlish eyes. “If there was anything I could do for you, I would.”
“Right.”
“I mean it. I don’t like not being able to help you. But look…all I am is a custodian who writes counterculture books that maybe a thousand people have read.” Treggs kept his gaze on her face. “A wind-pisser, that’s what I am.”
“A what?”
“My father always said I was going to grow up to be a wind-pisser. Somebody who pisses into the wind. That’s what I am, like it or not.” His shoulders shrugged. “Maybe I’ve been pissing in the wind so long I like the way it feels. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve got a good little life—both of us do. We don’t need much, and we don’t want much. Just the freedom to speak and write, and up at Rock City I play my pennywhistle and meditate. Life is very good. You know why it’s so good?” He waited for her to shake her head. “Because I have no expectations,” he said. “My philosophy is: let it be. I bend with the breeze, but I do not break.”