“Cream, no sugar,” Allan says, and without warning there are tremendous crashing sounds in the darkness all around us. Exploding tear gas canisters as big as depth charges plummet through the trees, sometimes bringing entire tree limbs with them. After the whump of the explosions, fire-lit clouds of gas begin to spew everywhere.
People run in all directions, many of them screaming in anxiety and excitement. We try to follow some clergy who are retreating with a giant cross, but a canister lands in the way. Gagging, eyes and nose streaming, we follow some dim figures to our right, our hands out like someone groping through a dark room. We bump into trees and benches, reach down to help people up who have been overcome by the gas. Behind us, the screaming begins to change character. It makes the hair on my neck stand on end.
I look back to see hundreds of police in gas masks marching into the park like a parade, riot sticks in hand, their razor-straight line breaking up only as they pause to club the fallen forms on the ground. The screaming now is entirely of pain, shock, and fear.
The running becomes a stampede, and when I turn back, find I am separated from Allan and Laura. I yell Laura’s name over and over, but I can barely be heard over the wails and shrieks of others.
On the other side of the park, away from the gas, coughing and retching as I make my way toward the coffee shop, I am arrested for disturbing the peace.
Because the system is choked with hundreds upon hundreds of arrested demonstrators, they have dredged up scores of clerks and secretaries and desk cops to speed up the processing. Even so, for those of us who have the money to post bond in order not to be guests of the city overnight, hours pass. We wait first in the wagon, then wait in a holding cell, wait to be booked and fingerprinted, wait some more back in the cell, and then file into Municipal Courtroom C, fifty at a time, to face the haggard-looking bespectacled judge, and at last are given a trial date in October and are ordered to be released on the twenty dollars’ bond we have already posted. We are spared the full treatment some earlier demonstrators got—the removal of belts and shoelaces, the impounding of wallets, rings, watches, roach clips, etc., the strip search and the caustic delousing spray. No, my group has it pretty easy, if easy is a concept you can apply to people who for the most part were arrested for nothing. But if the processing itself is not so bad, for me the wait is excruciating. What happened, I keep wondering, to Laura?
As soon as I am back out on the street again, I call Eliot’s. Even at this late hour, however, there is no answer, and anxiety again begins to build in me anew. It is past two in the morning by the time I make it back to Evanston.
The front porch light is on, and through the window I can see the gray-blue fluorescent light still flickering in the kitchen. I knock softly on the side door, hoping not to wake Eliot. He is in charge of the ward until the end of the month, and sleep is scarce and precious for him right now. I hear light footfalls, send up a small petition to the night skies. The door opens. It is Laura, barefoot and in T-shirt and panties. My blood jumps at the sight of her bare legs. She hugs me and again I smell vanilla and warm sleep. The touch of her straightens my spine.
“You’re all right?” she whispers.
“Okay, no problem,” I say. “You?”
“I’m fine. At least now I am. I’m so relieved.”
I look at her and we hug each other again. I feel her body distinctly under the thin cotton. As our embrace ends, I feel shy. I do not know what to do or say. We are in a transitional moment I do not know how to affect.
“You hungry?” she asks after an awkward moment. I shake my head.
“Thirsty,” I say.
She smiles as if, out of a galaxy of possible replies, I have said just the right thing. She pours me a large glass of orange juice, explaining that Debbie is spending the night on campus and that Eliot is exhausted from having been up all the previous night. She holds a finger to her lips for a second. We listen to the rumble of his snores for a few seconds and grin.
“You must be tired, too,” I say. I recognize I am scared about what lies ahead. Why else would I offer her an excuse to withdraw?
She shrugs. Suddenly I can feel my heart thumping: she is not tired. She has not seized the opening. My mouth goes dry.
“Are you?” she asks.
“I did a lot of resting in the slammer. What I really need is a shower.” I drain my glass, excuse myself. “I’ll be right back.”
“Okay. I’ll be in the d-den.” She gestures toward the foldout couch on which she has been sleeping.
When I return ten jittery minutes later, my hair damp, wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a towel flung—as if casually—over one shoulder, she is sitting up in bed. She is no longer wearing a T-shirt, but a white cotton nightgown. Her face and arms are illuminated by the blue flickering light of the television. I come in and rummage through my backpack as if looking for something. My hands are trembling. I do not know what to say or how to cross the few feet that separate us. From the screen Jimmy Stewart’s face looks at me, his eyes round with surprise.
“Anything good on?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says, her voice husky. “I don’t think so.” I hear a small quaver in the last word. She is nervous, too.
I take a deep breath and sit on the edge of the bed. Leaning over the few inches to kiss her seems a task no easier than jumping off a sheer cliff.
I jump.
7
I look for the Parrish family on the crowded riser seats the charity has set up at the university tennis courts for the Celebrity Tournament to Fight MS. Finally, from the glint of sun off the movie camera—a real sixteen-millimeter, not a camcorder—I find them. Laura, Annie, Director Jimmy, and what one might call his grip, Alexander Stafford. (From Annie’s recurring struggle not to stare at him, I gather he is filling a different role for her.)
I squeeze into a seat behind them. They greet me with such surprise and warmth, I am embarrassed. Even Jimmy stops filming to shake my hand. I suppose it is because I don’t very often pop up at social activities. A row in front of the Parrishes are Jeannie, Brendan, and Andrew, as well as Cindy Tucker and her two children. She turns to wave at me and smile. I return her greeting.
“Who’s Bobby going to play?” I ask Laura.
“Andy Anders, the sportscaster on Channel Six.”
Andy is something of a local institution. News and weather anchors have come and gone over the years, their replacements generally getting prettier and prettier and younger and younger. Andy, a former linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings, age fifty-six, has stayed. He has a gruff and throaty voice, a twinkling look in his eyes, and he conveys the sense that sports, while a profoundly serious matter to him and other fans, are finally entertainment. Playing against him, win or lose, should be pleasant. And he is popular enough to draw a crowd all by himself.
Andy Anders appears on the court to an enthusiastic chorus of cheers. Out from behind his anchor desk, he looks to be at least forty or fifty pounds above his old playing weight, all of it gone to his belly. As he swaggers, grinning, onto the backcourt dressed in a too-tight but colorful tennis shirt, he resembles a large craft sailing downwind with its spinnaker ballooning out before it.
Bobby, in new white shorts and an MS Foundation T-shirt, comes out to polite applause and begins to hit some balls back and forth with the sportscaster. After a minute or two of misses and dinks and over-hits, no one in the audience is able to mistake either of them for tennis players. Andy lets his racquet dangle dead at his side until just before the ball arrives, at which point he waves the thing like a flyswatter, even his fancy oversized racquet looking tiny next to his great bulk. Bobby, concentrating fiercely, runs as swiftly as his bad leg permits to each ball that comes his way, appears to make six or seven different decisions about what he should do next, does none of them, and then, with my borrowed racquet, does his version of the flyswatter
routine Andy Anders has mastered. Some people are grinning, others giggling. Their ineptitude has loosened the crowd.
Annie is pretending, badly, not to be excited about this match. Laura, I notice, is wearing makeup. It sharpens her attractiveness, I suppose, but I am surprised she feels she needs any help along those lines. She asks if she can lean back against my knees, and after I say of course and breathe in the scented air she gives off, I am discomfited to feel my pulse quicken. I have known her for so long, I thought I was long over this kind of reaction, meaningless as a morning erection. Or perhaps it is my having been thinking over the old days with such intensity, an acute temporary case of nostalgia, bad as the flu.
As they begin the match, Andy makes some cracks about going easy on Bobby, saying he’d hate to embarrass a well-known public figure in front of all these people. Bobby shrugs and says, “I don’t care. It’s only a game.” When Bobby’s first serve goes in and Andy muffs the return, however, Bobby storms up to the chair umpire—the university tennis coach—and, standing the usual pro tennis star’s outburst on its head, yells in mock rage that his own serve was out by a mile. He walks over to Andy’s side, pointing with his racquet to a point beyond the line.
“Play on, Mr. Parrish,” the umpire says into his microphone.
Bobby mopes back to his side, double-faults, then grins and says, “That’s better.”
Andy has a blistering first serve, one that would be hard even for the likes of Gerry Dolan to return. But, luckily for Bobby, it rarely lands anywhere near the service court. After a few games Andy begins to get winded, Bobby’s game steadies, and he begins to pull away, winning six games to three. After the final shot, Andy jumps the net, hugs Bobby, and raises his fist aloft in jubilation. “I don’t have to play the next round!” he yells.
Bobby’s look of satisfaction vanishes. “What next round?”
They say Gerry Dolan, now age thirty-five, made $20–$30 million in commodity and farm futures—mostly playing market puts and calls—before he spent three years as a White House aide. For the last two years as state party chief, he has become known for his ability to impose tight ideological discipline on a previously loosely run organization and more especially for his willingness to use almost any tactic in an election year. This year he got the town police in Rapid City to go on a wildcat strike with no warning, throwing up a picket line outside the convention hall where Bobby’s party was just beginning its nominating convention. Most of the delegates would not cross the picket line, and it was four hours before the governor intervened to get things settled. The press, after editorializing that it was clear the party could not handle its own convention properly, much less run the state, followed the trail of footprints about how the strike came to occur at all. The footprints led right up to the door of Gerry Dolan’s office and then vanished without a trace.
He is a lean, obdurately cheerful fellow who, besides politics, loves rock and roll, tennis, his shiny black Porsche, his two daughters, and winning. He has won his match against Bump Larmer, the university’s popular football coach, in a walk. He is polite and gracious about it, though, whispering pointers to Larmer between games and hitting most of his returns directly to the coach in order to sustain some long rallies.
Dolan’s smile to Bobby as they shake hands before their match is made up entirely of teeth, and it vanishes like a dropped curtain as soon as he turns to take up his position at the service line. There is something about Bobby’s reflexive competitiveness encountering Gerry Dolan’s mean streak that makes me nervous even before they start. If Bobby were to let himself lose without too much of a struggle, I think Dolan might let him off. But Bobby, being Bobby, will struggle, and I fear this is apt to excite Dolan in an unwholesome way.
I warn the row of Parrishes that Gerry Dolan is a former champion tennis player. Annie’s hand goes anxiously to her mouth. Jimmy says, “Uh-oh…” Laura shakes her head and Alex Stafford nods his, as if he knew this already.
“Dad’s going to lose?” Annie asks me, as if she can’t quite believe it.
“I’m afraid so, Pie.”
“It’s for a good cause, sweetie,” Laura says, patting her leg.
“He’s not going to like it,” Annie warns.
Dolan hits a practice ball to Bobby, saying, “I understand you have trouble going to your right!”
The audience laughs. Bobby waits for the sound to subside before he says, “I hear you don’t like anything near the middle.”
Even in warm-up, Dolan hits the ball hard. Bobby, with less time to think about what he is supposed to do, does much better, sending the ball back much the way it arrives. It is almost as if he is imitating Dolan on the spot. Gerry Dolan, who watched Bobby duff his way through his match with Andy Anders, suddenly looks at him with suspicion. Testingly, he hits a few lobs and spin shots.
It is interesting to watch a skillful player assess an opponent. It is a little like a professional driver testing a new car. Dolan brings Bobby up, sends him back, runs him from side to side, probes, and generally checks out Bobby’s specs and performance envelope. By the end of the first game, which Dolan serves and wins in four straight points, he has found everything he wants to know.
Before Bobby even tosses the ball up to begin his first serve, the match is, for all intents and purposes, over.
In expensive and impeccable whites, Dolan moves catlike around the court, every swift movement a picture of grace, effortlessness, and economy. When he runs after a ball, the audience can hardly hear a footfall. Bobby, on the other hand, gallops noisily around like a spirited horse, chasing everything to the last strain and final stretch, sweating, panting, grunting. The crowd, regardless of its political views, is soon leaning toward Bobby. By the third game they are openly yelling encouragement and cheering his returns.
An increasingly stony-faced Gerry Dolan is not happy. Nor is he pleased at Bobby’s steady improvement over the course of their playing. By the fourth game, the lobs, the topspin returns, the American twist second serve are not sure winners, and, perhaps buoyed by the crowd, twice Bobby wins tough points at the net, where Dolan has expected to send the ball past him. These are the only points Bobby wins, in addition to one shot Dolan hits a half-inch too long in Bobby’s backhand corner. Because all these points come in the fourth game, Dolan is forced to play at deuce, something that gives partisans like Annie the illusion that Bobby has lifted his game into competition.
Perhaps it is the heat or the frustration at being ignored by the audience, or even that Dolan himself is one of those who has developed the illusion that Bobby can play on an equal footing with him, but on deuce point, with the crowd applauding rhythmically as they wait for Bobby to take his position on the service line, Dolan forgets himself. Bobby, still a resolute imitator, comes in behind his first serve the way Dolan himself does. His serve, unlike Dolan’s, however, is shallow and pretty punchless. The ball arches over the net and sits up fat as a beach ball on Dolan’s forehand. Dolan glides in a few fast steps and, swinging with all his weight behind it, just about takes Bobby’s head off. Possessed with quick reflexes, he ducks, but not quite in time. The ball, a yellow blur to most of us, flies the few feet between them and caroms off his forehead.
There is a moment’s silence. Bobby straightens, shakes his head to try to clear it, and a large number of people begin to boo.
“You okay?” Dolan asks, his face pink.
“Fine, fine,” Bobby says. There is a bright red blotch on his forehead. If it hit him any harder, we might be able to read the brand of ball they are using. He runs his fingers through his hair. “I needed a haircut.”
Dolan apologizes, takes the next point, game point, but not until he lets Bobby have half a dozen solid returns. He wins with a deft drop shot Bobby cannot get to.
Game five and six speed by without Bobby able to take a single point. When they shake hands at the net at the end, Bobby says, “
Congratulations. Great game. Too bad there wasn’t a picket line keeping me out.” The crowd, most of them, laugh.
With obvious effort, Dolan converts a scowl into a smile. “Always a question of spin, isn’t it?” he says.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Bobby says in his best boy-from-the-farm manner. “Looked like plain old being good helped the most.”
Dolan finds nothing to say to this. Bobby shakes hands with the umpire and makes his way up to his assembled family as the next match begins. He greets and kisses them all, and then sits down next to me on the row behind where there is still room.
“You came,” he says. “Paint me orange and call me a school bus.”
“I’ve created a Frankenstein.”
He snorts and towels his face and neck. “I don’t think Andre what’s-his-name has anything to worry about.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. You didn’t lose any votes out there today.”
He lifts his face from the towel, glances at me, and says softly, as if it is a discovery he has just made, “This is going to be one tough election.”
I get an uneasy sense about how right he is the very next morning when I read an article in the newspaper about Rep. Richard Wheatley’s having released his health records and his emphatically calling on Bobby to do the same. If what I suspect is true, Wheatley has somehow come across some damaging information from Bobby’s college days and is positioning himself to use it. And I think I know what that information is.
Sounding the Waters Page 13