“Please,” he said. “I can’t stand violence.”
“Neither can I! But by God my son was stolen from me by a murderess, and you’re going to tell me what I want to know!” She shook him. “Can you dig it, man?”
He didn’t answer. Then, quietly: “Yeah, I can dig it.”
“Good.” Laura released him, but she blocked his way so he couldn’t escape. “You knew a Storm Fronter. Who was it?”
Treggs looked around. “Okay, come on! Where’re the pigs hiding? You brought ’em, didn’t you?”
“No police. Nobody but me.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anyhow.” He shrugged. “I don’t care if you’re wired. So I was in a commune for a few months with Bedelia Morse. Didi to her friends. So what? I didn’t hang out with the Storm Fronters, so you can put that in the pig pipe and let ’em smoke it.”
“What happened to Bedelia Morse? Did she die at the shootout in New Jersey?”
“No, she got away. Listen, that’s all I know. I was in a commune with Didi and about eight other people back in ’sixty-nine, before she got into the Storm Front. We were in South Carolina, and we broke up after four months because everybody got tired of getting rousted by the local pigs. End of story.”
“Didn’t you know her at Berkeley?”
“Uh-uh. She didn’t go to Berkeley. She got hooked on the Storm Front when she went to New York. Listen, I didn’t know anything else about her. Okay?”
“And you haven’t heard from her since?”
“No way.” Treggs bent his long body over and picked up the rake and broom. “You got your wire turned up loud enough for the pigs to hear? Read my lips: No way.”
“What about Mary Terrell? Is there anything you can tell me about her?”
“Yeah.” He took off his glasses, pulled a handkerchief from his shirt, and cleaned the lenses. “But you already know. She’s crazy as hell. She won’t give up to the pigs. They’ll have to kill her.”
“And she’ll kill my son. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I didn’t say that.” He put his glasses back on. “Listen, Mrs. Clayborne, I’m sorry about all this. Really I am. But I don’t know anything else about the Storm Front that the pigs—I mean, that the police and FBI don’t already know. I’m sorry you came all this way, but I can’t help you.”
Laura had an instant where she feared she might pass out. She’d built up her hopes—for what, she wasn’t sure—and now this was nothing but a dead end.
“You don’t look so good,” Treggs said. “You want to sit down?” She nodded, and he took her by the arm and led her to a bench. “You want a Coke? I can get you one.” She shook her head, fighting nausea. She realized that if she threw up, Treggs would have to clean up the mess. It might be worthwhile to do it, just for the hell of it. But she didn’t, and she lifted her face to the breeze and felt the cold sweat begin to dry.
She said in a husky voice, “Is there anything else? Do you have any idea where Mary Terrell might be?”
“No. I don’t know where Didi is, either. That was a long time ago.” He sat down on the bench beside her, his long legs splayed out. He wore red Adidas sneakers with stars on them. “That commune,” he mused. “Man, it seems like that was part of a different world. Well, it was, wasn’t it?” He squinted in the sunlight, and watched a hawk circle above the mountain. “Long time gone,” he said. “We had a nice life. Lived on a little farm, had a couple of cows and some chickens. We didn’t bother anybody. All we wanted to do was find nirvana. Know what the pigs finally busted us for?” He waited for Laura to shake her head. “No business license. See, Didi made things. She was a potter, and she sold stuff in town. She was doing pretty good, too, then bam: no business license. Man, I don’t see why we don’t run out of trees, with all the paper you get choked with. I mean, how come we’ve still got forests, with all the paper that’s been used in all of history? And think about wooden furniture, and houses, and everything else made of wood. How come we’ve still got forests?” He prodded her with a sharp elbow. “Huh?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should write a book about it.”
“Yeah, maybe I will,” he said. “But then that would be using more paper, wouldn’t it? See? A vicious cycle.”
They sat for a while in silence. The cold wind strengthened, and Laura heard the cry of a hawk on its current. Mark Treggs stood up. “You ought to see the rest of Rock City while you’re here. It’s nice. Peaceful, this time of year. You feel like you own the whole place.”
“I don’t feel much like sightseeing.”
“No, I guess not. Well, I’ve got to get back to work. Can you find your way out?”
Laura nodded. Where was she going to go? And what was she going to do when she got there?
Treggs hesitated, holding the broom and rake. “Listen…for what it’s worth, I’m really sorry about what’s happened. I thought Mary Terrell was dead, buried in an unmarked grave somewhere. I guess you never know who’s going to turn up, huh?”
“You never know,” Laura agreed.
“Right. Well, you take care. Too bad you had to come all this way for nothing.” He still lingered, throwing a skinny shadow at her feet. “I hope they find your baby,” he said. “Peace.” He made the sign, and then he turned and walked away.
She let him go. What was the point? At last, when she was sure she wasn’t going to be sick, she stood up. What to do now? Go back to Atlanta. No, no. She didn’t feel like making the drive this afternoon. Maybe she’d find a motel room, get herself a bottle of cheap red wine, and let it rip. Two bottles, maybe. What the hell?
She followed her shadow along the winding trail of Rock City; it was the thin, compressed shadow of a woman crushed between the past and the future, and every direction it pointed toward seemed hopeless.
3
Eve of Destruction
NIGHT HAD FALLEN. THE BOXES WERE A LIGHT. FROM THEIR windows came the glow of den lamps and televisions, small squares of illumination that marched into the distance. There were thousands of them in the darkness, thousands of lives going on about her as Mary Terror guided the van between row after row of Linden’s brick and woodframe houses. Drummer, recently fed and changed, lay in his new bassinet on the floorboard and sucked on a pacifier. The van’s heater had gotten cranky, wheezing with effort. Mary came to a four-way intersection, slowed, and then drove on, deeper into the heart of memory. The frigid wind swirled newspapers and trash before the headlights, and two men in heavy coats and caps with earflaps crossed the street. Mary watched them move away, out of the lights. She kept going, looking for Carazella’s grocery store. She thought she remembered it on the corner of Montgomery Avenue and Charles Street, but a topless bar called Nicky’s stood there. She wound through the streets, searching for the past.
Mary Terror had changed. She had cropped her hair short, and dyed it light brown with reddish hints. She had dyed her eyebrows light brown as well, and dotted freckles over her nose and cheeks with an eyebrow pencil. She couldn’t do much about her size but slump, but she was wearing new clothes: warmer duds—brown corduroy trousers, a blue flannel shirt, and a fleece-lined jacket. On her feet was a new pair of brown boots. A Hispanic man at a pawnshop in Washington’s combat zone had given her twenty-five hundred dollars for her mother’s seven-thousand-dollar ring, no questions asked. Since leaving her mother, Mary and Drummer had lived in a series of rooms that gave new meaning to the term “roach motel.” One cold morning at the Sleep-Rite Inn near Wilmington, Delaware, Mary had awakened to find roaches scurrying across Drummer’s face. She had plucked them off, one by one, and crushed them between her fingers. At the next place they’d stayed, Mary had had a bad feeling about the swarthy woman at the front desk. She didn’t like the way the woman had looked at Drummer, as if some light switch were just about to click on in the woman’s crack-fried brain. Mary had stayed there less than one hour, then had gotten Drummer out and hit the road again. The places they stayed took cash and didn’t ask
for identification, and most of the time the clientele were whores and Johns, dopeheads and hustlers. At night Mary kept a chair against the door and her gun under her pillow, and she always made sure she knew the quickest way out.
A close call at the Omelet Shoppe outside Trenton, New Jersey, had given her pause for thought. Two pigs had come in while she was eating her pancakes—“griddle cakes,” they called them up here—and Drummer was in his bassinet next to her. The pigs had sat down at the booth behind her, ordering up the Hungry Man Breakfasts. Drummer had started crying, a nettlesome sound, and he wouldn’t be pacified. His crying had risen to a shriek, and finally one of the pigs looked over at Drummer and said, “Hey! You didn’t get your mornin’ Java, or what?”
“She’s always cranky in the morning,” Mary had told the pig with a polite smile. How would he know whether Drummer was a boy or girl? She’d picked Drummer up and rocked him, cooing and clucking, and his crying had begun to ebb. Mary had been damp under her arms, her spine prickling with tension, and the little Magnum pistol in her new carry-all shoulder bag.
“Got a good set of lungs,” the pig had said. “Oughta try out for the Met when she gets a little older, huh?”
“Maybe so,” Mary had answered, and then the pig had turned away and that was all. Mary forced herself to finish her pancakes, but she couldn’t taste them anymore. Then she stood up, paid her bill, and got Drummer out, and in the parking lot she’d spat on the pig car’s windshield.
Where was Carazella’s grocery store? The neighborhood had changed. “Been twenty years,” she said to Drummer. “I guess everything changes, right?” She couldn’t wait for Drummer to get older so he could carry on a conversation. Oh, the things she and Jack would teach him! He was going to be a walking fortress of militant politics and philosophy, and he wouldn’t take shit from anybody on earth. She turned right onto Chambers Street. A flashing caution light was ahead, marking another intersection. Woodroan Avenue, she thought. Yes! That’s where I turn left! In another moment she saw the sign, and there was the building on the corner that had been Carazella’s. It was still a grocery store, but now it was called Lo Wah’s. She drove on two more blocks, took a right on Elderman Street, and she stopped the van about halfway down the block.
There it was. They’d built the house back. It was gray, and in need of painting. Other houses were crowded in around it, the structures jammed together with little respect for space and privacy. She knew that behind the houses were tiny yards squared off with fences, and a warren of alleys for the garbagemen. Oh yes, she knew this neighborhood very, very well.
“This is it,” she told Drummer in a reverential voice. “This is where your mama was born.”
She remembered it: the first night of July 1972. The Storm Front was in that house, preparing its mission on the weeping lady. Gary Leister, a native New Yorker, had been renting the house under an alias. Lord Jack knew a dude in Bolivia who sent up cocaine in boxes of cigars, the smokes hollowed out and packed with blow. It was with two of these shipments that the Storm Front paid their black-market source in Newark for an assortment of automatic pistols, riot shotguns, hand grenades, plastic explosive, a dozen fresh sticks of dynamite, and a couple of Uzi submachine guns. The house, painted light green in those days, had been an arsenal from which the Storm Front stalked pigs, lawyers, and Manhattan businessmen whom they deemed cogs of the Mindfuck State. The Storm Fronters had kept themselves clean and quiet, holding down the volume of all music and cutting back on their pot smoking. The neighbors had thought that the kids who lived in the house at 1105 Elderman Street had been a strange mix of white, black, and Oriental, but this was the prime of “All in the Family” and the Archie Bunkers of the world groused in their armchairs but minded their own business. The Storm Fronters had made a point of being friendly to the neighbors, of helping the older residents paint their houses and wash their cars. Mary had even earned some extra cash by baby-sitting for an Italian couple a street over. CinCin Omara, a mathematics major at Berkeley, had tutored a neighborhood kid in algebra. Sancho Clemenza, a Chicano poet who spoke four languages, had been a clerk at Carazella’s grocery. James Xavier Toombs, who had killed his first pig when he was sixteen years old, had been a short-order cook at the Majestic Diner on Woodroan Avenue. The Storm Fronters had blended into the neighborhood, had covered themselves over with the camouflage of the workaday world, and no one had ever guessed that they planned murders and bombings in midnight sessions that left them all flying high on their sweetest drug: rage.
And then, on the early evening of July 1, Janette Snowden and Edward Fordyce had gone out to get pizza and backed into a pig car on the way home.
“No sweat, no sweat,” Edward had said as he and Janette had told the others after they’d gotten back with the cold pizzas. “Everything’s cool.”
“STUPID!” Lord Jack had shouted into Edward’s gaunt, bearded face, coming up out of his chair like a panther. “Stupid as shit, man! Why the fuck didn’t you look where you were going?”
“It’s no problem!” Janette, tiny and feisty as a firecracker, was on her feet, too. “We screwed up, okay? We were talking and we screwed up. It was just a little dent, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” Edward agreed. “Busted our taillight but didn’t do shit to the pigs. They weren’t supposed to be parked right on our ass.”
“Edward?” It was CinCin’s cool Oriental voice, her face like a carved yellow cameo framed with raven hair. “Did they ask to see your driver’s license?”
“Yeah.” A quick glance at Lord Jack. Mary sat in a rocking chair in the corner, her hands folded over the swelling of Jack’s child in her belly. “But it was no sweat,” Edward went on. The license was forged, as were all their licenses. Edward flipped his long brown ponytail back. “The pig even laughed about it, said he’d busted up his own car last week and his old lady was still giving him hell about it.”
“Did the pigs follow you?” Akitta Washington asked. He was a barrel-chested black man who wore African beads and amulets around his neck, and he went to a window and peered out at the street.
“No. Hell, no. Why would they follow us?” There was a quaver in Edward’s voice.
“Because,” Mary said from her rocking chair, “some pigs have the sixth sense.” She had golden blond hair that hung around her shoulders, her face high-cheekboned and serene: the face of an outlaw Madonna. “Some pigs can smell fear.” She cocked her head to one side, her eyes cool and intense. “Do you think those pigs smelled any fear on you, Edward?”
“Get off his case!” Janette shouted. “The pigs didn’t roust us, okay? They just ID’d Edward and let us go, that’s it!”
Lord Jack began to pace the room: a bad sign. “Maybe it is okay,” Didi Morse said, sitting on the floor cleaning a revolver with the same fingers that could shape raw clay into objects of earthen art. She was a lovely young woman with green eyes and braided hair as red as a battle flag, her bone structure Iowa solid. “Maybe it’s no big deal.”
Sancho grunted, smoking a joint. Gary Leister was already attacking one of the pizzas, and James Xavier Toombs sat with his pipe clenched between his teeth and a book of haiku in his lap, his face as emotionless as a black Buddha.
“I don’t like it,” Jack said. He went to the window, looked out, and paced again. “I don’t like it.” He continued to pace the room as some of the others began to feast on the pizzas. “Snowden?” he said at last. “Go upstairs and watch from the bedroom window.”
“Why do I have to go? I always get the shit detail!”
“GO!” Jack roared. “And Edward, you get your ass upstairs and watch from the arsenal.” It was the room where all their weapons and ammunition were hidden in the walls. “Move it, I said! Today, not next fucking week!”
They went. Jack’s piercing blue gaze found CinCin. “Walk up to Carazella’s and buy a paper,” he told her. She left a slice of pizza half eaten and went without question, knowing he was telling her to go out and sniff the air
for the stench of pigs. Then Jack walked over to Mary, and he placed his hand against her belly. She grasped his fingers and looked up into his fiery beauty, his long blond hair hanging around his shoulders and a hawk’s feather dangling from a ring in his right earlobe. Mary started to say I love you, but she checked it. Lord Jack didn’t believe in the word; what passed as love, he said, was a tool of the Mindfuck State. He believed in courage, truth, and loyalty, of brothers and sisters willing to lay down their lives for each other and the cause. One-to-one “love,” he believed, came from the false world of button-down stiffs and their robotic, manicured prostitutes.
But she couldn’t help it. She loved him, though she dared not say it. His wrath could strike like lightning and leave ashes in its wake.
Jack rubbed her belly, and he looked at Akitta. “Watch the backyard.” Akitta nodded and went to do it. “Gary! You walk to the Laundromat and back. Take a couple of dollars and get some change in the machine.” The Laundromat was two blocks away, in the opposite direction of Carazella’s. Mary knew Jack was setting up a defensive perimeter. Gary walked out into the still, humid evening, and the smell of somebody’s burgers on a grill drifted into the house. A dog barked in the distance, two more answering across the neighborhood.
Jack stood at the front window, working his knuckles. He said, “I don’t hear Frodo.”
James Xavier Toombs looked up from his haiku, his pipe in his mouth, and a small puff of blue smoke left his lips.
“Frodo.” Jack’s voice was low and hushed. “How come Frodo’s not barking?”
Frodo was a stumpy little white mutt, the pet of the Giangello family two doors down the street. The Giangellos called him Caesar, but Jack had named him Frodo because of the dog’s massive hairy paws. Frodo’s bark was distinctive, a deep, throaty woof that started up with the regularity of a machine whenever any other dogs barked in the neighborhood. Jack looked at the other Storm Fronters. His tongue flicked out, lizardlike, to skim his lower lip. “Frodo’s quiet,” he said. “How come?”