KILL THE DOVE!—A tale of the revolutionary ‘60s
by Francis X. Kroncke
Cover design by Mikki Fattoruso, mfdesignstudio.com
PART I: THE OUTLAW
Chapter 1:The raid, July 10, 1970: Sauk Centre, Minnesota
“Look, motherfucker, the days of nonviolence are over!” Aaren sticks a stone hammer in her knapsack, then bends to tape a stiletto to her left ankle. “You warmed-over hippies might still think Jericho will fall if you march and march, wagging your fannies and farting Peace now! Peace now! Give peace a chance!”
Her tirade doesn't anger Jared, who falls under her benediction as hippie, for Aaren has ranted like this all during the three-day retreat. It’s her show of weapons that pulls the venom from her airy ideological ranting. They make her words poison darts.
“Put that shit away!” Jared bellows as he jolts from behind the couch to confront her. “You heard what I said. Put that shit away!” as he swipes her knapsack.
Aaren, at the other end of the same motion, effortlessly snatches her stiletto with practiced hand and presses its point against Jared's heart. The artfulness of the threat scares him more than the reality of the blade poised to slice him.
“Who the fuck are you anyway?” he shouts at her. She doesn’t move. “You didn't learn that move in graduate school!”
Aaren lets the blade talk for her. She draws, uses it as a kid would a sketching pencil, slowly in one graceful movement, circling down his rib case, across his stomach, up to
his throat. It stays but an instant before returning home at her ankle.
Jared is astonished by her swift, deathly move. He’s spellbound, almost tottering in the air like a string puppet. She glares up at him. She, a mite of flesh almost obliterated by the weight of his shadow. He, a tornado of male power, sucking himself back into a vortex of straining muscle working a heart not lusting for murder.
She spits rage upwards. “I've taken three days of your pacifistic bullshit, but I'm still here. I'm still going out.” Threateningly, “Are you?”
Her body arches arrogantly. It conveys her disdain of him. It holds him at bay. She quickly turns, spurns him. It’s an authoritative shirk that says to all that her actions are not to be discussed or judged.
Jared scans the group looking for support or at least condemnation of her. No one moves.
“So it comes to this--the revelation of our thinly veiled violence. All this,” and Jared’s right arm sweeps the room, capturing all nine, freezing them with his words, halting their departure in small groups. “All you people and our talk and opening up is bullshit like she says?”
Jared notices Sean turn and continue to gather his things. But no word. Sean? Sean his bud, his brother in nonviolent passion and civil disobedience—no word?
“No word, eh, Sean?” he expels. “No word from any of you guys?”
Disgusted, Jared drops Aaren's bag, pivots and returns slowly but resolutely to finish his packing. He stuffs in his tools and casing maps. Latches and slings a backpack over his left shoulder, and not looking at anyone, avoiding all, strides towards his designated car.
Out on Highway 61 it’s all North Country Minnesota farms and picture-book animals. “C-O-W, cow. Cow is a moo-moo. G-O-A-T, goat. Goat is a nyaah, nyaah.” Jared has been doing this for about twenty minutes when Matt breaks in.
“Don't know why you're so pissed off. How Aaren felt was apparent from the start.”
“Really? I'm the only fuckhead who didn't read her right?”
“Yep.”
The simple truth stings him. Maybe Matt’s right. Maybe I didn't want to face up to our real ideological differences. Out loud: “I just thought all this Weatherman bullshit was just that, bullshit. Can she really believe all that Marxist-Maoist crap about The Vanguard?”
“Yep.”
Jared recalls a poster Aaren put up during the retreat: “Revolution grows out of the barrel of a gun!” He laughed at her when she threw it out as a challenge to the group. Jesus, how she had scourged him for that!
“After Kent State . . . after the Christmas Bombing of Cambodia . . . after the Chicago Seven trial . . . after all the black murders and the endless lies about ‘Light at the end of the tunnel’. . . you're still quoting me King and Gandhi and Jesus?!”
Man, she had really been turned on then, ad it had turned him on—to her, not to her insane political rhetoric. He roundly denounced her “foolish macho posturing” and ridiculed her by dramatic exaggeration. He made her position seem buffoonery as he jumped around, wildly gesticulating and blaring, “And here’s America's armed Resisters, all steamed up and stampeding towards Suicide Cliff. I ask, How many barrels do you have, Resisters? Oh my! Twenty-five. And, How many barrels do you have, Uncle Sam? Oh my! Twenty-five million!” She stormed away from that confrontation. Jared remembers it with relish. “She's a pistol . . . and I'd like her to carry my barrel!” was his wry summation to the guys after all the women left.
Jared gave her a code name, “Liquid Fire.” That's how he feels around her, as if his thighs dripped molten desire. Not that she’s a beauty queen. On the contrary she could evaporate into “average.” He, a full foot over her five-foot-five and a ton more than her hundred and twenty-two pounds. Yet she’s quick, athletic and he likes that. Likes her long raven hair and her dark black eyes. Alluring eyes that gleam when she gets worked up. Eyes that reflect a distant light, a tenebrous source.
Jared sighs as he feels Aaren’s strong, daunting, relentless energy. Not macho, as he often says as a put-down, but piercing. God, how I'd like to wrestle with her, is his deeply repressed desire. Free love is something that Jared's strong Catholic upbringing thwarts. Plus he wants to be faithful to Char. He fails her now and then, but readily absolves himself with a confessional “I drank too much!” or “Just a one-nighter, I mean, we were stoned!” Here with Aaren, something shudders at his core when his lips form her name.
“Aaren.” Jared shivers a bit. An ethereal voice warns, “Sleep with her and you’ll never wake up!”
“Wake up!” Sister Johanna claps her hands just a hair’s breadth from Jared's cheeks. Up and down the line titters and giggles hide themselves in the folds of the white surplices worn by the twenty-plus pre-adolescents, all of whom see themselves warned by Her clap. She who looms as Her, the omnipresence of female power, more foreboding than their mothers could ever be, would be. “Sister,” they call her, but they all know her as the power from beyond Death.
Sister Johanna, the drill sergeant for Christmas midnight Mass, that gathering resplendent with all the pagan pomp of Catholicism in its Roman vestment. The Holy Mass in memory of the Father God who gave divine birth to his own Son without a Mother Goddess. The Night of the Forgetfulness of Her.
Ever chosen to be one of the special acolytes, robed in papal imitation, a white innocence among other black-robed acolytes, rosy-cheeked Jared carries a special torch as bodyguard to the newborn Babe. And at the crèche he’s honored to pull special time: holy hours in adoration, another privilege.
Yet, when Father is not looking, Sister Johanna enacts a conspiratorial role, that of spiritual terrorist. She takes Jared to the side altar, the one reserved for Mary, the “almost but not quite Divine” altar, and has him pray to Her. Yes, they are prayers that celebrate her “almost divinity,” praise her “mediating role,” address her as “co-Mediatrix of Grace.” Nevertheless, Jared learns Sister’s ardent lesson. “Pray to her, Jared. Every day. She is God’s Mother.”
“HOOONKKK! HOOONKKK! HOOONKKK!” Matt is arm-pumping out the window at a convoy of six big semis, jacked by the sound they love to unleash, especially in wide-open cow country. It spooks the bovines, gets them running and mooing. From a distance, dogs bark. It juices the bor
edom of their drive. The thunderous blare also snaps Jared back to the reality of the road.
“So, OK,” he asks, stung by this new insight into Aaren, “she meant all that shit when she called me, how's it phrased—lackey running dog of Imperialist Pigs?”
“Yep.”
“And you knew she was packing that blade?”
“Yep.”
“Jesus, why wasn't anyone else upset?”
“Because she's a solo. None of us can control her. It's just her karma.”
Oh, bejesus, Jared explodes within, Karma! Where the fuck’s Matt's head? This gal's going to bring down all the anti-war symbolism with her puny penis-envy dagger!
“She's going to ruin everything. I wish you'd've told me she was straight on that stuff.”
“Look,” Matt says as he checks the rearview mirror—not that he thinks they are being followed, just that they might. “Look, she'll get the job done.”
Jared blurts, “But the job's to create symbols of Resistance.” He flings the words at Matt as he did towards the others during the past several days, as if no one but he understood the purpose of the mission, the message of the raids.
“Damn,” Jared catches himself, pointedly embarrassed by his preaching at Matt. “Do I have to remind you about this? All we need is someone writing Maoist slogans on the walls and the media will eat us alive.”
Matt doesn’t respond. What is there to say to Jared?
A quiet settles between them. Matt kicks on the headlights. Jared half-reclines his seat, kicks back and broods. It’s a brooding whose edge he wants to cut, for he knows that he must be disciplined tonight, focused. Eyes closed, he searches for the flame of white light within.
“Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house. Your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Lo, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.” This, the priest was ever fond of quoting. It was his opening slogan for every eighth grade sex talk. Imagery he wanted to seed in their young minds. “Woman is made in the image of man. Man in the image of God. Jesus is to the Church as the husband is to the wife.” He held a priestly cache of such spiritual bullets. “Always,” and he would physically dramatize, moving his arm in jerky punctuation, “always keep women on a pedestal. Always.”
Youthful Jared ponders, Where else is it possible to keep them? Mary herself is on a pedestal—off on a side altar. There for all to see and adore. Truly, Jared believes: woman flesh, if not to be worshipped, is to be revered, respected, protected and, if God so calls, to be preserved. Flesh unsoiled. Unspotted.
Matt's is also flashing on Aaren. He knows that she is a symbol. Matters have changed since Kent State. “Extra! Extra! Four White Kids Killed by Ohio National Guard!” Many of the Resisters are now questioning nonviolence and Aaren’s starting to snare a few ears. Diverse rhetoric has always charged the anti-war Movement at every step. It’s not surprising that Maoist rhetoric now sways the fancy of those marginally committed to nonviolence. Matt always knew that “The Movement” was fraught with hangers-on, those who were there for the electric charge of the moment, the erection of the mass rally. Still, what does it matter? Karma. They either suck at the teats of the Peace Movement or find themselves being sucked blood-empty by Uncle Sam's Vietnam Vampire.
Just this May, five days after Kent State and five before a like incident at Jackson State—No Extra! Old Story: Nigger Students Bagged!”—while at the New Mobilization's mass “March on Washington,” Matt had seen them all: pathetics and empathetics, sympathizers and activists, the weirdoes and crazies. Hundreds of thousands of protesters giving rise to a moral nerve network that Washington didn't want, and which most of the protesters were unaware they were creating. Longhairs, old hairs, old Reds, New Lefts, beads, and business suits. Each but a dash or sprinkle in the witch's pot. A pot flamed to a sizzling overflow by the chants, murmurs, prayers and sacred ejaculations of Catholics, Jews, Protestants, even Buddhists! What group wasn't there?
At first Matt stood back, sought a vantage point to assess whether the milling was a mob, a Movement or, what he spied for, a new Heart. At first he felt only terror. The multitude was a swill, a gulp of humanity pitching like an unsettled stomach. Indigestion of soul. Patiently, he waited for the vomit. Yet, at some unmarked moment, It became a We. Maybe it was the influence of the Marshals for Peace that Jared had joined. The four thousand or so who lined the route and kept dousing the surge with hope and vision, chanting, “Peace now! Give peace a chance!” Such were words of potency that day.
“All we are saying is give peace a chance!”
Matt had not been able to explain all that day meant, but he knew it had grounded him in his commitment to clandestine civil disobedience.
May 8, 9 and 10, 1970 would stand as watershed dates for Matt as they would for others in the anti-war Movement. Yet, committed as he was, a small voice lingered that shook his certainty. Once, while stoned on hashish, Matt had blurted to a room full of Movement heavies, “We're all just a bunch of young assholes, college punks, grad lab junkies.” Why his brain would not flush away that line even now he can’t figure out. My karma? Whatever. At this moment it draws him to look again at himself and Jared and the image of Aaren.
Jared. What can I say about Jared? Matt imagines him an Angry Angel. Like the one who carried out God's expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden. An angel seething with holy anger, faithfully obeying his God’s command through committing an act of “holy violence.” He’s heard Jared speak about “Holy Nonviolence,” but Matt wonders, “Has he crossed the line? Like Aaren?” This question lingers briefly, quickly fades, sucked down within the flowing country night blackness that has been slowly mesmerizing Matt.
Matt’s driving on mental cruise control because he has driven Highway 61 a hundred times up to his family's summer cabin on Birch Lake. Once again he’s awash within that familiar cloak of darkness that quiets and settles the farmer, blankets him and embeds his dreams. It pacifies Matt, soothes him. Not even the snorts and teeth-grinding from slumbering Jared can ruffle his inner calm.
“. . . for I have sinned!” Oh, shame! Oh, withering flesh!
“Bless me, Father!” Oh, to live without this . . . this Thing!
“You are to be pure. You have a Vocation!” But how can he now? Ever sin spotted, hands ever guilty. “Having touched . . .” Not what would later be known as pleasure, for it was only titillation, the gasp at the expanding “weenie balloon,” like the Balloon Meister at the Italian Festival, twining lengths of pencil-thin balloons into shapes, linking them, laughing at the sausage doggie. “How big’s your wiener?!”
Now his self-condemnation. Weeping. At his weakness of will. For without intent he has knocked Her off Her pedestal, so he confesses, for he has thought, “Janet Tremblay's soft breasts . . . ,” and his doggie went wild.
“Oh FATHER . . .”
“Bad doggie! Bad doggie!”
As Jared wakes only the hum of the road and the hot kiss of rubber on warm cement greet him. Oddly, all else is silent. No music on. Matt’s noiseless. Clearly in deep thought. Or something.
It’s still a bit over two hours to get to their target. Matt’s never been much of a talker, Jared knows that, but he sure has the best road boat in the Resistance! Matt’s resurrected 1957 Chevy Bel-Air, with gleaming fins and all, is a true relic. Matt’s a natural talent when it comes to highway hogs, and has truly raised this clunker from the dead. Inside and out: glistening and meticulously clean. Matt's own type of shine and new. Junkyard retrofitted engine matched by down-home interior refurbishing. Paisley-robed bucket seats and beaded curtains. Fancy Hippie stuff, but not overdone; a soft sniff of incense.
Matt’s the type of guy who talks more to his machines than to people. Jared sees this trait expressed through Matt's immersion in music. Immersion is the correct word Jared assures
himself as he checks the stacks of tapes Matt has stashed and secreted away in “Shiree,” as he calls
her. It seems like Matt always has music in the background when he doesn't have it in the foreground. He's like an acidhead, stoned on music all the time, though Jared knows Matt is mainly a light weed man, like himself. The Grateful Dead are his main guides. Matt’s truckin'—though he travels in touch with all who are sounding the magical thump and wail of the counter-culture.
As if reading his mind, just like that—click!—Matt starts to spin a medley of Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues, Iron Butterfly, and a dash of the Beatles. As they get closer to their target, Jared knows Matt will switch into another cosmic channel. Minnesota's own hard-driving Bob Dylan, the sweet rousing Joan Baez, the soulful Janis Joplin, all leading up to the final sprint—wild Country Joe and the Fish, blaring Matt's draft raid anthem, “I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag.” The two will shout out. Scream it. Beat it with their fingertips on Shiree's forehead, but never, like a duet singing the “Star Spangled Banner,” belt it in key.
Come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself in a terrible jam
'Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.
And it’s one, two, three
What are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s five, six, seven
Open up the pearly gates,
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
His dad. What he always remembers is the sheer joy of walking next to his dad. Knights of Columbus parade. Holy Name march. Veterans of Wars, sacred and profane. There was the sense of doing something. Of carrying out in his own small way the War—against Whom was not necessary to know, for it was always against Evil. Satan in some guise. Even the Protestants and Jews.
His Dad in naval attire, a picture he long admired. A status he was eager to attain. But wherever he would go it would be where Dad said, “Go!” And from the first, it was to Him crucified. Following a pathway as uncluttered as it was cruel: “Thy will be done.”
“Say only that, Jared. 'Thy will be done.'”
To wage the battle so as to win victory, all that was required was to surrender one's will. It was this humbling act of submissive obedience that was seed to Jared’s character. Its flower was the act of offering oneself cruciform to the world, in imitatio Christi.
Ten miles later, with Janis cranking on “Ball and Chain,” a huge grin suddenly rises on Matt's face. “Did she tell you about her fantasy?”
Without waiting for an answer, “Of course she didn't. Not to you.” This private joke keeps Matt amused for several miles.
Jared wants to ask but doesn't. He's not sure he wants to know about Aaren’s fantasy. Must stop thinking about her. He struggles to get back into his own space. So he chimes, “Sure, Matt, I know—it's her karma, right?”
Jared stiff-legs the seat back, reclines it as far down as it can go, and writhes for comfort. He painstakingly unfurls his six-foot-five frame, wiggling toenail to fingernail into a spot here, a twist there, capturing for bits of his two hundred forty-five pounds of lean muscle tiny niches of comfort. So laid out, he closes his eyes.
Matt mirthfully needles the slumbering giant about Aaren by inserting and raising the volume on Dylan's “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!”
“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Jared's thurible bangs against the pew but grief deafens all. He aches to lift the lid and converse with the dead. “Dad . . . Dad, do you know now? Is it true? Is He the Son of God?”
“Pit stop in 'bout two minutes,” tugs Jared back into Matt's world.
“This is taking longer than I remembered. By the time we get there the other four will have gone down.” Look, man, paranoia doesn’t mean they ain’t following you. So you don’t drive straight, never. Take 61 to 95, hang a left, go through St. Cloud, hook-up with the 52, that way if they are following you, you’ll notice. Screwball driving, sure, but it’ll only add an hour or so, maybe less.
“Probably.”
Jared loves Matt but his habit of tossing one-line answers never fails to irritate him.
“Okay, man, you've never really dug out your reasons for doing this. I mean, you sat in that retreat for three freaking days and you were as silent as a spy. Don't you think it’s time you at least let me know what's churning inside?”
“Nope.”
“Christ Almighty and bejesus! Cut me some slack, Jack. Here we’re about to commit yet another crime against Big Brother and all I really know about you is your short obituary.” Jared mimics being interviewed. “‘Yes, I risked my life with him many times. Yes, we were very close. What can I say about him? Sure, he did some Methodist seminary time, was a dedicated granola vegetarian, and a devotee of the Grateful Dead.’ Fuck, Man, that's not much of a base for long-term revolutionary commitment, is it?”
“Nope.”
“Is this the Theater of the Absurd or am I bundled here with a renegade sage from some hilltop?” Jared laughs at himself and his smirking partner. “Wait—then I can say, 'Yes, I knew him, he was six feet tall, not too fat, not too thin, not too religious but not too non-religious, not a Democratic but not a Republican . . . C'mon!”
“Matt, your father's dead.” And he runs and runs, looking for him all over the world, until he comes to the bedroom. Hoisting the whiskey bottle, he gags on its bitterness. Now he understands why his Dad hid this vile liquid all around the house. He, at ten, now grasping that this bitterness kept his father alive, for it must be so—the sacred elixir which Matt reasons his Dad must have forgotten to take today and so he died. Matt squeezes his eyes tightly shut and braces his throat for the bath of fire. He gulps the fullness of his Dad's bitterness.
“Okay,” Matt grabs the wheel with both hands, stiff-arming himself back. His words are drawn from him not by a compulsion to confess or to satisfy Jared's curiosity but by the rightness of the moment. Karma.
Matt speaks as if quoting himself.
“To cause the least harm.”
“That's it? Absolute passive nonresistance?”
“Can it be non-absolute?”
“But why are you a raider? Isn't that non-passive?”
Matt brakes and slows as he takes a full, deep breath, inhale . . . exhale. “Think about this: To live causing the least harm, one must be prepared to suffer the most harm.”
“Sounds like a recipe for martyrdom or suicide.” As soon as he says this, Jared regrets it. Regrets its stupidity and insensitivity. Regrets it with a flush of embarrassment because the identical sentence has been flung at him so many times when he has testified to his own way of nonviolence.
Matt smiles, sighs, murmurs a soft, “Think about it.”
“Karma, is that it?”
Matt steadies himself—they have the time, so he figures he might as well try. “Karma is a tricky concept. It’s not shallow, man. Look, we all carry things from the past and into the future. It’s what we do with them now that counts. How we turn them into right action, moral action. What happens to us is less important than what we do with what happens to us. Get it?”
“I thought it meant fated, like predestined or some iron law, like gravity?”
Matt’s about maxed out on words; he takes a deep breath. “No. Just that everything we do right now is related to what we’ve done and will do.” He chuckles. “Trying to figure what karma means might be your karma, but it ain’t mine. Get that?”
Jared wants to say yes but he really doesn’t get it. He’s about to press the matter, as Matt knows is his way, so, “Coffee time!” he blurts, like a ref calling “Time out!” Also with the urgency of one long overdue for a piss.
It’s 11:30 p.m. as they pull into the lot beside the Bashful Viking Bar & Grill. They are on the outskirts of their target, Sauk Centre, Min
nesota—Sinclair Lewis’s famous “Main Street.” The symbol Jared wants: “The Draft Board on America’s Main Street.”
“Am I a Conscientious Objector?”
“No.”
But how can it be that simple? Jared in his novice monk robes as Friar Otto pleads to the Master and the onlooker, “But . . .”
“No buts. Your role is to obey!”
Could it be simpler? “His will be done.” Wasn't this now his own father, dead, speaking through the Novice Master?
From within his heart, in testimony to all Fathers, he strongly voices, “Thy will be done.”
Auburn, Indiana, 1964. The post office. Friar Otto signs the Registration form—“Jared Jennings”—and hands it to the Selective Service clerk.
As Matt docks Shiree, Jared forces a hard look at him. Why have I been risking my life with a guy I don't really know? Why is he with me?
It's a sign of the times, these fucked-up times, he answers himself. An answer that accounts for his many oversights as he, as all students-become-Resisters, rushed to end the war. Right now he realizes that he’s never even gotten Matt’s physical details together. White, truly white. Blond on blond. Hazel eyes. Taut body, like a seasoned tennis pro. But I don't even know if he works out! Maybe we're together because it is “just karma,” as he says!
Jared banishes any further musings, especially those that draw out his hunger for the past. Those not-so-distant early Sixties that were quiet days of monastic confidence when he had only to pray and fast to feel at peace with himself. He doesn’t want that hunger tonight. Yet he also doesn't want the pangs of starvation that throttles him when he thinks about now, the moment, this supposed “times they are a'changing” that charge the air of all the crazies and dopeheads and Flower Power kids who run amuck in the spirit of “these revolutionary times.”
No, he doesn't want yesterday nor tomorrow, not even now. He just wants to act, to do something! Almost the frenetic “Do it!” of that asshole Jerry Rubin. Do it! Consecrate, immolate, expiate! DO IT! These thoughts settle him as he sits down at the counter, cups and welcomes the warmth of the steaming java.
Steam: the perverseness of a Minnesota bone-chilling winter day. Was it not sufficient that the Earth hardened her heart and refused to yield, had to be forced? So rudely pick-axed and back-hoed in rock screams. Bodies rest in tombs above ground in New Orleans. In Minnesota many must wait until spring’s tender thaw to inter their dead.
Joseph: brother. Eleven. Fourteen months older: almost twins. A memory of steam.
It’s the words of the priest, so silly and stupid, about “little angels” that draw steam from the ten-below air. Tears cloud all eyes and fog Jared's glasses, creating a slope of ice on his nose, consigning him to the taunts of small devils who laugh at him as his glasses keep falling off. Jared bends the sides so hard they stab his ears. He feels no pain.
Steam. Holy whispers. Evidence of prayers from the Communion of Saints. Even the casket exudes steam, as if Joey himself is praying, a young child’s prayers.
This is their beloved child who died at eight yet lived, entombed in a betraying body, for three more years. As then, now stand the inconsolable parents, brothers, sisters, all Jennings from far and wide around the cruel, cold hole. All ask, through their father’s spoken doubt: “How could God let this happen to an innocent child?” All hear, through his submission, his obedience, through his arms cast out and upward in cruciform surrender, through his uttering out loud a fiercely hissing steam of words: “Thy will be done!” Only then does the family, does Jared, hope again in their God.
Roses, as they are laid upon the casket, start to shrivel, curl up into dark scarlet lines and blackened clumps as the bitter, harsh, dry December cold transforms them quickly into rose crystals. Yet they die victorious as their steam rises in celebration. Jared hears, says to all, “Closely, listen closely . . . you can hear the hush of steam.” Yes, truly, a hiss, a rosy angelic ejaculation, “Thy will is done!”
After his second cup, Matt flips into his raider mode. “Let's go over this, a final time.” He pulls out a short yellow pad with a hand-drawn diagram. “This office is a lot like the one in Hastings. It’s on the second floor and as planned we climb up here,” he pinpoints the spot with his spoon, “and then jimmy this window. As from my casing run, it's pretty well shadowed from the street. Once inside we go through this door, out into the corridor, score and torch the glass, and bingo! It's rock ’n’ roll time.”
Jared’s amused by how excited Matt gets about raids. The guy makes you feel like there's no danger. He really gets off ripping off the Selective Service.
Jared quietly chuckles. Some guys get cranked by cheating the IRS. Matt gets juiced stealing, defiling, burning, and shredding draft files. It's like watching a young priest robe for Mass during the early years when they still have fervor. They get lost in the ritual. Really meet their God in the drama of symbolic sacrifice, and crack open that special space and time called holy. Jared had always finagled a way to serve at their masses. Matt brings these old memories back. In his own way, he's a priest. Jared muses, immolator of symbols.
The purest of kerchiefs laid with sepulchral touch, the priest rises, eyes searching Jared's. Eyes that stand in terror of the Devil who must have possessed him. How else this desecration? For one instant Jared misjudged and the Host fluttered to the floor. His stab to halt its flight only jostled the priest and caused two more Holy Wafers to be defiled.
It’s not Jared's awkwardness that irritates the priest. No, he himself has been as Jared, has done as Jared. Rather, it is the task he knows lies ahead. Canon Law is exactingly specific. The area must be scrubbed clean: scraped and scraped with the Paten so that no crumbs are left. No microscopic Real Presences. “For the host is the Real Presence, Jesus here in the bread and the wine.” Not a molecule, nary an atom is to be defiled.
It’s a laborious task, one that almost inevitably yields tastes of floor wax, droppings of candles, grime from leather soles. As he blesses himself, Father knows this is the Sunday morning taunt of the Vile One. Verily, he will be strong and stomach the distaste. Only a priest knows God under such foul circumstances.
Jared watches in rapt fascination. Awed, yet knowing that he could not, no, really does not want to spend his life in service to the Hosts. For it is not the Host that he honors by serving at Communion—rather, he’s delighted by the rare intimacies it gives him with Her. She, Mary, Mother of God, present in the guises of young women to whom he could never in any other circumstance be so close. How otherwise to inhale the perfume that Janet wears? Or spy the strap on Stephanie’s bra? Or confront the temptation of Martha’s oh so soft and inviting pink tongue!
“Bless me . . .”
“. . . are Called!”
Oh, Mary Mother of God, pray for me!
As they cut their lights and slip into the alley, the emotion of Country Joe's song sobers them:
Come on Mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on Fathers, don't hesitate
Send your sons off before it's too late
Be the first ones on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.
Its imagery makes Jared think about the others, wonder whether all has gone smoothly. Right now the tally is three raids for the good guys, zero nabs for the bad guys. No one has gotten caught. Yet he fears to admit, Not yet, you mean!
“It's been six months since the Beavers, did you know that?”
“Nope, haven't thought much about it.”
“Seems like six years, six eons.” No one's gotten caught. Karma.
What about tonight? Lots of things have changed rapidly during the last months. After the Beaver raid, that St. Paul anti-war festivity, Hoover had sent in over a hundred FBI Special Agents. Back then, Jared blustered, “Jesus, they must've been jacked. It must've blown their minds that the largest draft raid in Resistance history would happen in Far
mland, USA! Jesus, what a gas, fifty-five boards and the State Director's office in one night!”
Their success swelled their bravado. “We're going to gnaw away until the tree falls! We're going to be busy beavers!” The media image took, so they used it in their post-raid PR—the “Beaver 55.’ Like other draft raid groups, they wanted a name that would irritate, annoy and miff the Feds. A name of silliness and ambiguity but a name that could instill a fear that there were many, many raiders out there, gnawing away.
Fatefully, neither satisfied nor patient enough to sit tight, wait out the Feds, Jared and a handful of Beavers plotted, upped the ante, decided to move out into the countryside. Knock off a chain of smaller draft boards, circling and creating a “Ring of Fire” around the Twin Cities.
Little did Jared and his city slicker comrades realize how different small towns would be. During their casing runs, their amateurish disguises only made them more visible to Our Town’s denizens. Old ladies watch everything, pass along rumors. “Hippies! Oh my, Millie, I saw two hippies in town today!”
Although Jared savors this Beaver 55 footnote to American anti-war history, he’s agitated by another gnawing, somewhat somber afterthought.
“Matt, how did you feel when the Kenneth Legion posted those ten-grand bounties on us?”
“Part of the risk.”
“Yeah—now's not the time to think about that.”
Once inside the board, the night proceeds routinely on this the third raid for each of them. Matt tapes the office door’s glass pane, scratches a triangle, torches and pops the glass. In a sec, they find and are ripping the files marked “1-A.” Olly olly home free!
Yet, tonight something is wrong. Jared is beset by a wave of fright. He's perspiring like a fool. Maniacally reciting “Hail Mary, full of grace” over and over in his mind. Silent prayer.
“Over here,” Matt whispers. He’s crowbarring another lock when Jared is startled by the first sound out of place. He grabs Matt's arm.
“Hear that?”
“Nope.”
Matt heaves and with one jerk snaps open the file cabinet. As practiced Jared scans the drawer, quickly picks out the 1-A files and throws them into a trash bag. They always steal some, just to fuck up the System as much as they can.
“Thump, thump!”
“Hear that?”
“Yep!”
Neither looks at the other. Both move towards the door. Jared drags a chair and Matt starts pushing a large desk.
“We need five minutes,” Matt says out loud, not whispering anymore. “Just five minutes.”
They blockade the door and swiftly return to the file cabinet.
“Plan B! Plan B!” Matt blurts, saying it over and over with escalating excitement. “Plan B! Plan B!” as he throws a bunch of files into a heap.
Jared douses them with charcoal fluid.
“Open the door! FBI!”
“Shit, fire them up! Burn the suckers!” Matt howls.
“FBI!” once again. Then the blockade starts to heave and split like a ship battered by high seas. The files flare up quicker than Aaren's temper but just as fast smolder into a thickening cloud of smoke.
“Jesus, where can we go?”
“Over here, in the corner.”
Both cough, move towards an open window.
What they had not planned for was Plan B. Plan B was always a joke. “And if you get caught, burn the suckers! At least go down in a blaze of glory.”
“Blaze of glory” was a humorous password among them. Now it rouses terror.
“Put out your hands!” Like a turtle asked to stick out its neck. “Show me your palms!” Ah, will the sting ever be forgotten? The memory of the ruler: palms, not knuckles. Sister Johanna loved palms. It was the Brothers who later lashed the knuckles. But she, Dreadful She, diligently watched, looking for signs of weakness.
She did not have to say it, he knew. “Don't cry!”
It was a hope, a prayer, a plea, “Don't cry!”
“Saved by the FBI! How humiliating,” Jared mocks himself as he’s pulled and pushed out of the choking smoke. It’s a scene he will long remember. They had smashed in what remained of the door, stuck their guns through the smoke, all the time yelling, commanding, threatening. “FBI! You're under arrest. Don’t move or we’ll kill you!”
Kill me, shit, I'm suffocating to death and I'm supposed to be worried about him killing me?
Later on, that memory never fails to get a laugh. But this night it doesn't.
Jared at first was sure that it wasn’t really the FBI but locals. Mad-ass VFWers or some redneck bunch itching to kick their radical asses all over town. But Sweet Jesus, it is the FBI!
“Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
Jared's relief is short-lived. A gloved fist whacks him across the chin, implanting a spike of pain he’s never felt before. Where's Matt? Is he okay? flicks through his mind. He’s answered by a jabbing stick, poking and snagging his belly flesh, sticking him with needles of hurt that throw him into spasms. He would have retched but nothing functions as his every sense scrambles for shelter from the attack. It's not the FBI! Holy Jesus! A final flurry of punches sends him reeling to the floor.
Before Jared can get up, a heavy book, thick and droopy—later jailhouse chatter names it the phone book trick! “Leaves no bruises, see, it’s magic!”—is slammed on top of his head and someone begins beating on it with a club. Heavily hard, heaving breaths hard, pounding a dull popping beat into his head. “God! What an unforgiving headache,” is how he’ll retell it later.
Thoughts of Matt have disappeared, replaced by a set of images that Jared has never let out, only now paroled from his nightmares.
“Don’t move or I’ll break your arm!” Jared stirs under the blanket of sticks and wads of newspapers as bully-boy Quinn strikes, then blows out the match. “I warned you!” Quinn hefts him up, a seven-year-old skinny as a twig, and yanks his left arm behind his back up to his ears, Crack! Crack!
“What did you do to get him so angry?”
What did I do? Dad . . . what did I do?
Why doesn’t anyone believe me?
The beating drives Jared back so deeply into a repressed area of his psyche that it releases a fury and a savagery that threatens his own sense of himself. He—the preacher of nonviolence, the trainer in nonviolent tactics, the spiritual witness to the nonviolent Jesus—explodes and attacks with the savage violence unleashed by Quinn.
In a blink—he could never recall how it happened—Jared ejects himself up from the floor, throws out his arms as if scattering tall brush and swatting down a pathway, slaps his face to focus his eyes, and lunges towards the nearest human form.
For what seems longer than a chase dream, he holds on to this form, a form he does not take in as to size or weight or even gender. Off balance, he flings himself so bundled against the wall, bouncing back to the other side, holding on as if to a treasured packet, banging and banging, thumping and thumping till a chilled dark wind settles him down in a frontier town of the dreamless unconscious.
She smiles as they walk up. Monsignor Boyle says, “He’ll make a good priest.” She smiles but it’s just to artfully cover the lie. Gracefully—her bitterness deeply hidden—she untethers the boy from herself. His tender hand she places in the hand of this ancient one, but his heart, never! This is not the first time nor will it be the last that he—Reverend Father!—will steal her treasures. But she knows how to survive. Her heart holds firmly on to the crucifix on her rosary as she prays “Holy Mary Mother of God!”to carry off this ordeal. The throb in her throat is but a repressed outlet for the grief she’s feeling at this theft from her loins. Her own mother had told her, “Marie, keep your eyes on the crucifix. It’s the only way!”Jared enters the “minor seminary” at thirteen years of age.
“Good evening, Mr. Jennings.”
The phrase, the salutation floats from somewhere and settles on the tip of his nose. “Good
evening,” as he tries to focus on the shadow, “. . . Mr. Jennings.” He’s coming to, hearing other noises, voices.
“Good evening, Mr. Puglasi.”
“Matt—Matt, is that you?” Jared feels himself shout, but not so that others can hear.
Mr. Jennings . . . Mr. Jennings . . . Mr. Jennings . . . . the call for his name, as in the early days of the seminary, before he became Friar Otto. As regained in those days of college where
it was a sign of his forthcoming adulthood. His name—but who knows his name but Matt?
Four men are standing above him. He’s sitting on the hallway floor outside the draft office. No smoke, only odor. His body is so sore that he does not feel pain at all.
“Who are you?” he asks, his voice like that of a lost child.
“Mr. Jennings,” a fatherly voice begins to lift Jared, “I’m Agent Brennan, FBI.”
Agent Brennan, as he helps Jared stand up, begins adjusting his clothes, tugging his shirt, smoothing out his slacks. Jared is really confused. How did they know? Who told them? He doesn't want the word to live but it jumps up bawling, Betrayed! Betrayed! You’ve been betrayed!
He can't see Matt. Where have they taken him? Who does he suspect? No, no, she wouldn't—Aaren? Why had she gone solo? What had she meant, “What this Movement needs is more blood!” Could she? His thoughts are shattered as suddenly Matt's body is thrown up against his. Where’d he come from? How…? Later he’d hear, “FBI magic, voodoo, man, these guys are spooky!”
He touches her body. Softness, her smile. So inexperienced in images and words, her breasts defy his tongue but he adores, whispers, “Sweet breezes.” His soul licks hers. These, his thoughts the moment before the screen is pulled and he’s paralyzed. Netted in Confessional darkness.
Before he can muster, “Matt!” Before he can express his concern about the welt on Matt's cheek both are shoved, pushed with those tiny thrusts whose meager energy builds like the first grains of a sand slide from infinitesimal to infinite initiating Matt and Jared's slog down a creaking flight of wooden stairs to the street and towards a harsh reality.
The Little Hoovers handle them according to their orderly ways. Speedily, each is spread across the trunk of an unmarked car, patted down, and handcuffed.
Off to the side an ambulance idles, lights flashing. What happened? Splayed on the trunk, Jared strains to see but can’t. “You son-of-a-bitch!” is heard as a hand grabs his hair and yanks his head back. A knee pounds an ungodly pain up into his butt, the blow placed expertly with full force on his anal sphincter. His head is thrown back down against the car’s rear window, a head thud! almost driving him back into unconsciousness. Word fly that he does not hear, “Stop!” “Jack, don’t!” “Get that motherfucking fag pinko bastard, good!” Actions happen that he does not see: Agent Brennan walks up and stops the pummeling. Only later will he learn, at trial, that he had broken this agent’s arm, that he was “the nearest human form” Jared bounced around the hallway.
Jared and Matt are spooked, scared, subdued, exhausted. They are not left alone for a second. Someone is watching them or someone is questioning them; relentlessly.
“Where are the other guys?” one agent keeps asking. He asks it about every other minute. He appears to be in charge.
“You guys are in deep shit, so you better cooperate,” he cajoles. Silence.
What’s Matt thinking? Is he listing names?
As if hearing his question, Matt, in the one moment they are left alone, smiles and says, “Karma.”
“Karma?” Jared snickers. A slow rumble of chuckling gathers and builds, then erupts. He’s roaring louder than he wants to, pain and ache and unplumbed tension fleeing on his sound. His attempt at self-control breaks down into a series of muffled snorts.
At the first sound, the head Agent practically leaps on them. “Quiet! You jerks think this is funny? You'll see how funny prison is! Separate these two.”
Jared can’t regain his composure and when pushed into the FBI's back seat he writhes with the unseemly stabbing numbness of excessive giggling.
“Arise, Friar Otto!” In his father's eyes it can be seen: “Thy will be done.” Here, as for centuries, a son reborn as Son. In the denial of Her birthright name he now comes: Franciscan
Investiture, 1962. His father's middle name, “Otto.”
On the ride back to Minneapolis’s Hennepin County Jail, and as Agent Brennan barks, “Take these jerks to the Hole!” a tape loops endlessly through Jared's mind: I am alive. I am alive. Leave your name and phone number and I will get back to you as soon as possible. I am alive. I am alive. This plays and replays all during his short clips of conversations with the Feds.
“We got you guys cold. You're not as smart as you think.”
“Don't you guys got anything better to do than beat up on nonviolent protesters?”
“Nonviolent! You call this raid nonviolence?”
“What do you guys think about the war?”
“I think it's great!”
“Are there any priests in your group?”
And so it goes, jabs of conversation, leading to no knockouts.
Jared lets the film reel roll. Acts his part. In the sole moment when he finds himself questioning the night, Did the FBI beat on us? he stomps on the urge. He doesn't want to analyze the evening. Doesn't want answers to that question. So he rewinds the reel and plays it again.
He imagines Matt Giving them his famous one-liners. That'll drive them nuts! Then he remembers all the other guys. Were we all betrayed?
He feels Aaren and her stiletto: agitation. If she’s not Judas . . . Would she really use that piddling dagger? If she has, did they shoot her? Would they shoot a woman?
As she reaches towards her ankle, a savvy agent cocks his gun and point-blank aims it at her. Jared lunges, throwing his body across hers. The bullet couples them. He’s fatally wounded. She lives.
She gazes upon him: he’s John Wayne. He looks at her: she’s Maureen O'Hara.
“Liquid Fire!” he gasps as he touches her tears. “Liquid Fire, I love you.”
Screen dissolves.
“Bejesus, how stupid!” Jared snorts. To others, a comment without an apparent cause.
“Yes? Do you have something to say?” encourages Agent Brennan.
Jared doesn’t hear him. He's recasting the fantasy, realizing how enraged Aaren would be by such a scenario. If she got shot . . . Man, what would she think? What was her fantasy?
So taken by this fancy is he that Jared misses what distinguishes this night from any he’s ever had or will have. He wants a Revolution and now he’s got one. But it’s certainly not his hoped for “Peace now!” world. No, hardly—rather, his life is about to start anew and no one's singing “Happy Birthday.”