The Laws of Our Fathers

  'It's groovy,' said Lucy. 'Except the straw. Everybody's nose? That's gross.'

  'Where do you come into this stuff?' I asked Hobie.

  'Panthers are into some awesome shit,' he said, as he was sniffling and wheeling his head about to absorb the rush. 'This here, man, this is a far-out form of political fund-raising. They've got a dude, man, he's stamping out acid in tabs with the big B on them? Wrapped in the little bubbles of cellophane? Aspirin all the way, when you look at it. Outta-sight operation.'

  'Hobie even went to Cleveland's house,' said Lucy. 'He's got like kids. It was all weird and everything. Did you tell Seth? There are all these guns? And -'

  With his huge hand, Hobie had taken hold of her knee. His eyes flashed at me somewhat tentatively.

  'That whole scene, they're freaky paranoid, you know. "Safe houses." All that shit. Fucking I Spy, or something. You know the rap: I'm righteous and I'm a brother, but anybody else, nothin bout nothin. I had to swear by the Zulu gods.' He smiled at himself. It took me a second to understand he was saying he wasn't going to talk about it. Hobie and I generally had no secrets, particularly when it came to his exploits. But Cleveland remained a touchy subject.

  Late one afternoon, shortly after the turn of the year, Hobie rang the bell and stood downstairs in his green army-surplus poncho. The rains had come then, occasional chill downpours, but more often drizzle and heavy fog, nasty stuff that felt like a cold hand gripping my bones. The blue flame in the space heater in our hall was never off.

  'Okay you drive?' Hobie yelled up. We were going to play

  basketball on campus. As we were walking among the puddles toward my car, I glimpsed Hobie's old Dodge Dart, springshot and rustworn, off in a corner of the gravel lot. The car had the old push-button automatic and half a psychedelic paint job, both front fenders whorled in color. I asked what was wrong with it.

  'Nothing. I just got some stuff in there.'

  Hobie had an uncharacteristic poor-mouth expression and I pushed past his hand to inspect. The car was full of oozing burlap sacks, piled on the front and back seats. Hobie, who'd followed, pointed to the sky and told me it was raining.

  'Hobie, don't be a douche bag. What is this, the Magical Mystery Tour? What the hell do you have back here, man?'

  'Sandbags.'

  'Sandbags?'

  'Suckers are heavy, too. Wudn't even sure Nellybelle was gonna make it up the hill on Shattuck.' Nellybelle was his car, named after Roy Rogers's sidekick's jeep.

  'You get the lowdown from Noah? Are we havin another flood?'

  'It's just a favor, man. That's all. I was rappin with Cleveland a little after Contracts yesterday, and he asked when I was comin this way to hang with you. So he's like, well do I mind any stoppin at an auto-supply place - tells me where a couple are - pick up a can of battery acid and twenty sandbags. Gives me the money and all. Weird, right? Saidjust leave the car unlocked. Somebody'd get it.'

  'Eddgar?' Cleveland didn't know anyone else in the building. 'Man, I didn't ask. It's just a favor. Dude does for me. I do for him.'

  'Hobie, you better watch your ass.'

  He hooted at that, particularly coming from me, Eddgar's admiring employee. 'Come on. Battery acid and sandbags? Gimme a break, Jack. Why should I be gettin uptight about that?'

  'Well, what are they doing with it?'

  Hobie shrugged. 'Only thing I could figure is like winter travel. You know, Gurney's always topping off his battery and throwing a few sandbags in the trunk around this time of year. But it's gonna be a hell of a climate change for California, if that's what he's getting ready for.'

  'Maybe he got an advance forecast from the Weathermen.'

  We larked around for a moment with the notion. What a gas if the Weathermen really knew something about the weather. Or, better yet, could change it. Talk about making trouble.

  When we came back later, I was careful, at Hobie's instruction, not to pull in next to his car. Instead, I watched him cross the lot. It was still raining. Inside, he turned my way and rolled down the window so I could see him as he mouthed a single word: 'Gone.'

  One Wednesday afternoon in January, I walked into Michael Frain's apartment, calling for Nile, and found Michael in bed with June Eddgar. It was around 4 p.m. Down on campus at another Student Mobilization Committee meeting, I'd been pierced by a sudden fear June had forgotten I was off today, and that Nile, as a result, would have no one looking after him. Shouting the little boy's name, I'd rushed through all the places in the building he was likely to be. From the bedroom, I was sure I'd heard Michael answer, 'In here.'

  When I pushed open the door, June was sitting up in the bed, with the sheet drawn across her chest and her other hand pinching the bridge of her nose. Lying beside her, Michael was turned away from me. I could see nothing but his skinny shoulders and the pale bald spot among his longish dreadlock curls. But even at that I recognized him. It was, after all, his apartment.

  I said exactly one word, 'Whoops,' and turned completely around. 1 ransacked myself for some idea of what to do next and finally, foolishly, called Nile's name again.

  'We said, "He's not here," ' June answered behind me. She was in the doorway now, unclothed. She confronted me flatfooted, utterly confident of herself, as I took in what she unflinchingly revealed - limbs of trim strength, the dark female triangle, a tummy barely sloping and withered by childbirth, her daring

  uncompromising nature. Released from her ponytail, her bronze hair fell to her shoulders. 'Nile's with Eddgar,' she added, clearly aware of the boldness of speaking her husband's name in these circumstances. That said, June closed the door.

  June had always seemed elusive to me. Campus legends painted her as a revolutionary drone, fully governed by Eddgar and the requirements of doctrine. There were astounding rumors - that at Eddgar's demand she'd slept with the entire Panther leadership council in Oakland; that she'd taken wild risks smuggling in weapons for the Marin County jail breakout. But to me that picture never seemed quite right. She rarely passed a mirror without a prudent look at the fine figure she saw there, straightening her collar, patting a stray ringlet back into place, still a bit the Southern cotillion queen. June's training at Easton was in theater, although, in the spirit of the cultural revolution, she now worked on the line in a salmon-canning plant in the East Bay. Yet at moments she continued to exude a star's enigmatic domineering air. She was forever laying a hand on my elbow and somehow getting me to do favors - run to the store, throw wash into the dryer - although we both knew these errands weren't part of my job. Even Eddgar, at moments, seemed wary of her. Now and then I saw them in the kitchen, hip to hip, debating in low voices beneath an old console radio playing to foil any wiretap. Eddgar watched her tensely lest something be missed at his expense, his lean jaw set, his focus unblinking.

  The dimensions of the Eddgars' relationship, always unclear to me, now seemed unfathomable. But no one else, it turned out, was as shaken by my discovery as I was. Sonny, when I told her later that afternoon, actually laughed.

  'You mean this isn't like the shock of the century?' I demanded of her. 'You don't find it perverted? Don't look at me that way. It's weird, man. She's a mother, for crying out loud. She's fifteen years older than him. I mean -' I couldn't find the words.

  'God, are you uptight.' I was always unnerved that Sonny's sophistication about sexual matters was so much greater than mine. Most girls I'd grown up with fretted obsessively about their virginity, but Zora was a freethinker and in late adolescence Sonny seemed to have found welcome solace in the attentions of men.

  'Uptight?' I asked. ‘I mean, what about Eddgar?'

  'What about him? Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he likes it.'

  'Eddgar?' There were many disciples of free love in Damon, but it was hard to imagine Eddgar as one of them. 'Think about this. I bet she's the one who convinced Eddgar they can trust Michael. You know. Even though he's hooked into Applied Research and that whole thing? I'll bet she did.'

  '
So?'

  'So, it's like her revolutionary movement is all in the hips.'

  I debated for a few days about whether to mention what I'd seen to Hobie and Lucy. He was a menace with secrets, especially when he could use them against someone, like Eddgar, whom he wanted to cut down to size. But the gossip was too sensational to keep to myself and I finally shared it at Doobie Hour. It turned out both of them already knew.

  Lucy nodded stoically. 'It's sad for him, really,' she answered. 'For Michael?' Over time, Lucy had succeeded far more than the rest of us in drawing Michael out. No one ever disliked Lucy; she was too passionately sincere. Men, especially, seemed to pour their hearts out to her, stirred by the way her tiny brimming brown eyes, her entire being, seemed given over to whatever they had to say. For Michael, so ill at ease, this avid, unquestioning interest must have been especially welcome. Lucy and he usually cooked together, on the weekends. The rest of us did the scutwork while they toiled happily in the kitchen, murmuring to each other like children. Lucy let cheerful talk pour from herself with the natural forward motion of a fresh running spring. It hadn't occurred to me, until now, that there'd been anything confessional about their discussions.

  'He wants her to leave Eddgar,' Lucy explained. 'Leave?' I'd envisioned this relationship as no more than a dalliance.

  ‘I mean, her thing with Eddgar is a nothing. Nothing,' she repeated, with an emphasis that suggested sex. 'Not since Nile,' she added. The intimacy of this detail threw me for a loop. I suspected at once that June - or Michael - was simply inventing excuses.

  'What sense does that make?' I asked. 'Why's she stick with the guy?'

  Lucy hitched her slender shoulders. 'She told Michael he's like the greatest actor she ever met.'

  'Actor?' I'd heard similar remarks about Eddgar regularly -that he was a chameleon, a phony. But I hardly expected that from June.

  'It was a compliment, I think,' Lucy said. 'You know, like a great actor makes Shakespeare even greater? Or maybe, he's at his best onstage?'

  'That dude doesn't even know who he is if he's not onstage,' said Hobie, who'd been listening with his joint from his usual outpost on the rug.

  I was unsettled by all of this. Neither Michael nor June ever spoke a word to me about their affair, but I felt the silence we all maintained made us - me, in particular - conspirators against Eddgar, even, possibly, Nile. The whole arrangement suggested things about love, the world of women and men, that I didn't understand, or perhaps even wish to know. After that, I was always uneasy whenever Michael and June were together, pretending to be indifferent to one another.

  'From what I hear, Graeme's parties are really wild,' Sonny told me as we approached the little Victorian coach house in the city where Graeme was living. It was late January, near the end of the semester. I could see that Sonny had weighed saying anything at all. I was carrying a half-gallon jug of wine in a paper bag and she was wearing a black shawl and a floor-length skirt made from an old American flag. Her hair, freshly washed, lifted in the city winds. I thought what I always thought, that she was gorgeous. 'We'll just see, okay? But I may not want to stay long.'

  'He's your buddy.' I'd thought it was sporting of me to come in the fust place, but Graeme had promised it would not be the usual departmental party, with people talking about Foucault as if he were an intimate. Sonny found Graeme endlessly intriguing. He was ironic and complex, and egalitarian in manner, and she admired his innovative if grandiose structuralist theories. Graeme claimed that the Western societies were in the midst of altering the episteme - the ultimate generative structure from which all thought in the culture devolved, a kind of girdle on the brain that loosened and changed shape only at critical historical moments, one of which was now.

  'Sonny!' Graeme cried, as we came through the door. He was lit already. Both arms were aloft, a clipped roach in one hand glowing amid a twirl of fragrant smoke. He came crashing down upon her in a stifling embrace and, without a glance at me, swept her into the living room and the midst of the dense, gabbling party crowd.

  I realized gradually that Graeme had been honest in a way. This party was nothing like ones we ordinarily went to. An expectant, high-voltage energy charged the air and the crowd was far more funky-looking than the Damon contingent - leggy sinuous women with miniskirts and ironed hair, men in beads. Plangent sitar ragas groaned from speakers hidden amid the deep human undergrowth in the room.

  That night people seldom spoke of politics - the war or Loyell Eddgar - which were the staples of university conversation. Here there was only one topic and frequent references to bacchic adventures that had occurred before. The guests tirelessly discussed open relationships, always concluding that anyone who refused to take part was not simply unhip but somehow dangerous. A girl whom I encountered while I was putting down our coats uttered the Weatherman dogma that one purpose of the revolution was to destroy monogamy.

  This young woman, named Dagmar, remained by me most of the evening. She was a student of Graeme's, a junior in one of his undergraduate courses. Dagmar was blond, with a cheeky face and imposing breasts, barely concealed by a stretch top she wore braless. It did not occur to me until later that Graeme might have inspired her role as my escort, or distraction.

  Whenever I tried to find a sight line to Sonny, she seemed unapproachable. There were always a dozen people around Graeme. His long form and whitish pageboy remained bent over Sonny, his arm loitering about her shoulder. At one point, I broke free to offer to fetch Sonny a drink. There were mescal and tequila available, and a tremendous amount of dope. In the first instant she glanced over, Sonny seemed somewhat startled to see me, then reached for my hand in a way that seemed so paltry and apologetic that I fled back to Dagmar immediately.

  Near midnight, virtually at the stroke of the hour, a group of men and women stalked through the living room entirely unclothed, the dark pubic regions and swinging parts shocking and incongruous as the clink and chatter of the party went on. A moment later, someone switched off most of the lights.

  'Are you ready?' Dagmar asked.

  'For what?'

  'For what's happening. Come on, Seth. Be mellow. Don't hassle it.' She touched the heavy buckle on my jeans, and I jolted back protectively. Dagmar took this response antagonistically. She eyed me fiercely and tended to herself. Her little miniskirt slid to the floor, then she unsnapped the body stocking and peeled that off too. She was revealed at instants by the oscillating shadows of a lava lamp. Drunk and stoned, besotted by the evening, I found it hard to deal with the cruel edge of this invitation. Dagmar's breasts were very large but tiny-nippled, blued by a heavy network of veins. We confronted each other without speaking, then she moved off with an insolent toss of her soiled blond hair. I heard the determined thud as she pounded up the stairs.

  I careered through the first floor. Sonny and Graeme were gone. Forlornly, I considered the staircase up to the bedrooms. Utterly bewildered about what I might do next, I headed up. In Graeme's bedroom, I was relieved to see no sign of Sonny. But most of the group which had capered naked around the living room were there, six or seven men and women, applying body paint freely to one another with their hands. One fellow had sprouted an impressive hard-on, which a young lady was obligingly swirling in a kind of Day-Glo green from a squeeze bottle. Two other groups were engaged in various states of intercourse. On the waterbed, three people, two men and a woman, were entwined, a nest of butts and legs, in what I took to be a post-coital trance, while below, on the semi-privacy of the shag rug, another couple was grinding away. The guy, who was on top, had a belly so huge it looked almost as if there were a foreign object between him and the woman beneath him. When she turned my way, I recognized Dagmar. She gave me a vaporous smile and lifted one hand, still pudgy with baby fat, even as she jolted with the fat man' s emphatic thrusts. I thought she was waving and timidly waved back; I realized then she had been beckoning me inside.

  'On the bus or off the bus, m'boy.' Graeme had caught me by the elbow. H
e was in an improbable getup, dressed only in briefs and dark elastic socks attached to calf garters. A few errant hairs grew amid the spots on his sternum. He tried to edge me from the door, but I was too spaced-out to move. The room stank with cat pee, and I noticed only now shadowy forms within the waterbed mattress which I recognized as goldfish. Graeme was gone momentarily. When he returned, Sonny spoke behind me.

  'Come here, baby.' She stood down the narrow hall, which was yellowed by a Chinese paper shade that covered the single bulb. If anything, she appeared prim and collected in her flag skirt.

  'One of those girls asked me to sleep with her.' I was well enough out of it that this struck me as some kind of explanation of my conduct.

  ' "Women." Which one?'

  I turned back to the bedroom to point, but the door was closed now and Graeme was gone.

  'Did you?'

  'Hell no.' I was slow. 'What about you and Graeme?' I asked. She seemed to shake her head.

  We found Sonny's shawl bundled in another room downstairs, and left in silence. I stood still suddenly on the walk outside, my face to the stars and the dank city night. It was like the touch of a cold towel, a sobering relief after the spoiled, smoky air of the cottage.

  'God,' I said, 'what a dildo I am. This guy invited us to this party fourteen times, and I never flashed on what he was up to.' 'Referring to what?'

  'Referring to the fact that in your case he's got his own ideas about conquering the mind-body dichotomy.' She said nothing.

  'You sure you didn't sleep with him?'

  'No. I said no.'

  'But you thought about it?'

  'You're hassling me, Seth.' She plunged down the walk and I slowly followed, the noise and music of the party dwindling. 'Am I supposed to be against it?' she asked. 'Am I supposed to think it would be immoral or bad? I didn't feel like it. He's old. He's strange. It's not my bag. Okay?'