Mean Streak

by Carolyn Wheat

  “He said the fields weren’t a playground and it was Belita’s parents’ job to keep their kid at home. He said it wasn’t his fault if these people didn’t understand English.”

  Jan’s words do their intended task. The students all shake their heads in disbelief and disgust. Rap says what most are thinking: “Truth is, I’d love it if we could hit them with the real thing. Put them in a coma just like they did to Belita.” His big-knuckled hands weave webs of intrigue in the night air.

  “But no,” he continues, “we’re going to make damn sure there’s no parathion left in that canister. Kenny here is the chemistry maven, so it’s on him to get every bit of the stuff out of the canister and put in a neutralizing agent. So when we fill it with pepper oil there’ll be no trace of poison left. Right, Kenny?”

  Kenny nods. “Right.” His boy-voice cracks on the word.

  “There’ll be no screwups like there were on the Fourth of July, right?” Rap takes the carton of ice cream from Ron. Holding the soggy cardboard carton aloft, he lifts it to his lips and drinks the melted pink mess.

  “That wasn’t my—” Kenny begins, but Tarky’s black-eyed stare silences him.

  Tarky’s black brows lower like thunderclouds. He fixes Kenny with a stare intended to intimidate. “You’d better not fuck this one up, kid.”

  The radio has gone into a commercial. A jingle tells the listeners that if they want a used car, they’ll be “on the right track at Nine Mile and Mack” in nearby Detroit.

  Cass looks at the others one by one, loving the intense passion in their faces, the clear empathy they show for little Belita. They are, she is certain, on the right track.

  CHAPTER THREE

  August 21, 1969

  Ted Havlicek sits at his desk in the Amigos Unidos Community Action Center. He is a recent graduate of Toledo University’s journalism program and acts as press liaison for the center and stringer for the local paper, the Toledo Blade. His desk is covered with half-finished press releases; a sign above the portable typewriter reads NOTICE: THIS PROGRAM IS SET TO SELF-DESTRUCT DUE TO LACK OF FUNDS.

  On the wall are an unframed Peter Max poster of Bob Dylan and two Blade stories on migrant workers with the byline underlined in red. An avocado-green radio on the desk thumps out “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl.”

  “But what do you need a notebook for?” he asks the slight boy with the long, serious face. “I use them for reporting, but what do you need with one?” It isn’t that he can’t spare a steno pad; hell, he’s already rooting around in his desk drawer for a fresh one. It’s that in the depths of his journalist’s soul he has to know the who, what, where, why, and how of everything that comes his way. And that includes knowing why Kenny Gebhardt wants to play reporter all of a sudden.

  The kid’s sixteen-year-old voice cracks as he replies, “I’m sick and tired of what’s been going on around here. I want to find out who’s been doing this to me.”

  “Doing what?” Ted’s blue eyes are guileless behind his wire-rimmed glasses. A jolt of annoyance rips through Kenny; Ted can be a real pain in the ass when he pretends not to know something everybody knows he knows.

  “Setting me up. Making me look bad.” Kenny shoves his hands into the pockets of his bell-bottoms. “Like the time I brought the wrong flyers to the rally. The ones in English instead of Spanish. I opened the fucking box back at the office. I checked them before I put them in the station wagon. Then when I get to the rally, they turn out to be the wrong ones. But would anybody believe me when I said I checked?” Kenny’s voice rises to a boyish pitch; he drops his eyes and contemplates his worn hightop sneakers.

  “They think I’m a dumb kid,” he mutters. “Like I’d really pull that stunt at the radio station.”

  Ted stifles a smile. “Yeah,” he agrees, “that was pretty stupid. We’re supposed to be airing a tape in Spanish about applying for food stamps and instead all we get is Donovan singing ‘Mellow Yellow’ about twenty-five times.”

  Kenny raises his eyes and stares Ted down. “Well, I didn’t do that either. I took the tape Rap gave me to the station; it’s not my fault it was the wrong one.”

  “So how’s the notebook going to help?” Ted leans back in his swivel chair and puts his elbows on the armrests. All he needs is a green eyeshade to look like a very young editor of a small-town newspaper. The long sleeves of his white shirt are rolled up and his wide, brightly colored tie is loose. But if he had to cover a story, he could knot the tie and put on the navy blue blazer and step out the door looking like a professional.

  “I’m going to do what you do,” Kenny replies. “I’m going to take it with me wherever I go. I’m going to write down everything I see and hear. I’m going to find out who’s making me look bad.”

  “Kenny, nobody thinks you’re sabotaging us,” Ted says. “If we did, would we trust you on this parathion thing?”

  On the radio, Motown has given way to acid rock as Grace Slick tells the listeners that their friends, baby, treat them like a guest.

  “The only reason they want me to do the switch is that they’re afraid the stuff’s gonna eat right through their skin or something.”

  “Still, they asked you to do it. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t trust you.” Ted adjusts the glasses that slide down his nose on hot, humid days. “That’s got to mean something.”

  Kenny shrugs a skinny shoulder. “I dunno,” he says. “Maybe it’s just another setup. Another way things can go wrong and I can get blamed. All I know is, I’m going to be watching everybody. I’m going to find out who’s screwing me around if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Three hours later, while sitting on the porch of the White House, which sits next to the art museum, Kenny finally sees something worthy of recording in his notebook. A man in a black suit steps out of a black car and adjusts his black sunglasses before proceeding to the entrance of the museum. Kenny has seen the man before, standing in the rear of the crowd at a migrant union meeting. Rap was the one who said aloud what they were all thinking: FBI.

  The Toledo Museum of Art is a miniature Parthenon on Monroe Street. Surrounded by emerald lawn and guarded by two massive copper beeches, it constitutes a tranquil bastion of culture. But what is an FBI agent doing there?

  Kenny hops off the porch, smashing a purple hollyhock, and runs toward the museum. The fed is at the door; Kenny takes the shallow marble steps two at a time and gets inside just as the man takes a complimentary map from the circular desk in the middle of the rotunda. Then he turns left, toward the mummies.

  Of all the crazy places to follow an FBI man, the museum strikes Kenny as just about the craziest. But the museum is right next door to the White House, the big Victorian where Wes and Tarky and Rap and Ron and Cass live. The house where the front-porch meeting happened. And even though Dana and Jan and Ted all live with their families, they hang out at the White House often enough that a meeting inside the museum would be easy to arrange without creating suspicion. And if anyone came along and saw them, anybody like Kenny himself, they could just separate and pretend they’d both come to see the El Grecos. The more Kenny thinks about it, the better the museum looks as a secret meeting place.

  But where in the museum has the FBI man gone? Kenny has followed him through the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman rooms and is now in the medieval hall. But where is the dark-suited man with the military haircut?

  It hits Kenny with a jolt: the Swiss room. Has to be! The Swiss room is a tiny little space, about the size of a cabin on a Cris-craft, off the El Greco gallery. It’s wood-paneled, with bunks in the corners and a huge, gaily painted ceramic stove with steps. As a kid, Kenny spent hours standing behind the velvet rope in that room, imagining himself a Swiss child sleeping on that cozy shiplike bunk or sitting on the steps of the warm stove, listening to Grossmutter’s stories of the old days in the Alps.

  It’s a good place, the Swiss room. A place you could stay in a long time, pretending you belonged.

 
A place he hates to think about someone meeting an FBI agent in.

  There’s one door in and out; it’s perfect for a secret meeting.

  But who is the federal agent meeting? And why?

  Kenny steps on sneakered feet toward the huge painting that hangs right next to the Swiss room door. He pretends intense interest in the rearing horses breathing smoke, in the raised swords and the plumed helmets. His patience is rewarded by whispered voices.

  “… parathion,” he hears. And “county fair.” But try as he might, he cannot hear more. Cannot hear what the FBI man is saying in response. Cannot even hear enough to swear whether the speaker is male or female.

  He can’t stay here. He can’t be here when they come out. He can’t be seen spying. But he has to know—which of his friends is inside the Swiss room, selling them out to the FBI?

  He saunters toward the next room, the one with the Impressionists. As soon as he enters, he turns and hides behind the wall, positioning himself to see whoever comes out of the Swiss room on the heels of the FBI.

  A uniformed guard walks up to him. “You’re standing too close to the paintings,” he says. “I’ll have to ask you to step back.”

  Kenny reluctantly removes his gaze from the El Greco hall and says, “I wasn’t touching anything.” He sounds like a sullen kid, which would piss him off if he cared about anything except seeing the person who’s about to walk out of the Swiss room.

  “Please step back from the wall,” the guard repeats. “I don’t want to have to ask you to leave the museum.”

  Just as Kenny opens his mouth to reply, the dark-suited FBI man strolls past him. He passes the Cezannes and makes straight for the exit. Kenny’s head swivels back toward the El Grecos. No one there. He races toward the Swiss room, the guard in hot pursuit.

  When he reaches the little alcove, he steps inside, his heart pounding. Who will he—

  The room is empty. The guard clamps a heavy hand on Kenny’s shoulder and escorts him out of the museum.

  Kenny sits down on the marble steps, warmed by the summer sun, and writes in his steno book everything that has just passed.

  From the White House come the strains of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They read the news today, oh boy.

  The same summer sun peers through the green canopy of the weeping beech in the little park behind the museum. The tree is a landmark; its sturdy, iron-gray trunk bears carved initials from as early as 1926, and its spreading branches conceal the two people who sit on steel-strong branches under the emerald leaves. The smell of burning hemp fills the shady nook and the sound of Cream emerges from a transistor radio hung on a strap from an upper branch.

  “God, you are such a drag,” the girl in the Indian-print shirt says, holding the roach to her lips and sucking deeply. She eyes her older brother with scorn. “I mean, haven’t you got any balls?”

  “Cassie,” Ron begins, then stops and starts again. This is the summer she refuses to be called Cassie, the summer she emerges as Mama Cass. “This isn’t about balls. This isn’t even about politics. It’s about common sense.”

  “You sound like Dad,” his sister replies. “Next thing you’ll be telling me I ought to major in Elementary Ed so I can fall back on teaching. Or something equally bourgeois.”

  “Bourgeois,” Ron mutters, raising his eyes to the topmost leaves. He wears his varsity T-shirt from Kent State, but the peace symbol around his neck marks him as something other than your usual jock. “What one year of college will do for you.”

  “All I know is that Wes is right,” Cass says. She leans forward, grabbing a branch for support, moving toward her brother with catlike intensity as if willing him to see the world through her idealistic eyes. “We have to take a stand, make people listen. We have to show them the way the migrants live, the way the farmers don’t care what happens to kids like Belita. We have to do it by any means necessary.”

  But Ron reacts to the first words instead of the last. “Wes is right,” he mocks. “Wes is always right, according to you. But is he right because of what’s between his ears or what’s between his legs?”

  The defiant, pot-smoking hippie chick of thirty seconds ago widens her brown eyes, as shocked by her brother’s remark as her suburban mother would have been.

  “This has nothing to do with sex,” Cass replies loftily, pushing away the mental image of Wes Tannock’s tanned shoulders. She finishes the last of the roach, blowing smoke through her nostrils like Bette Davis. “It’s about the way the migrants live in those horrible chicken coops. It’s about all the children who’ll spend their lives bending over and hoeing pickles for fifty cents an hour. It’s about Belita. Don’t you understand, Ron? If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.” Now that Belita is home from the hospital, she can afford rage.

  A new song from the transistor informs them that they’re on the eve of destruction.

  Ron Jameson leans back on the tough old tree branch and stares at the light filtering through the leaves. Sitting in this tree is like being part of the forest itself. The weeping branches bend down to the ground, covering the tree with a dense yet translucent awning. From the outside, no one could tell that two figures nestle in the low, thick branches. Inside, it’s cool and enveloping and safe. Ron wants things to be safe, not so much for himself as for his impulsive, good-hearted, naive sister.

  His parents will never forgive him, he’ll never forgive himself, if he lets her go into this alone.

  “Okay, babe,” he says at last. “Tell Wes we’re in. Let’s go to the county fair.”

  “Power to the people,” Cass replies with a raised fist. She sings along with the radio, gleefully agreeing that the eve of destruction is at hand.

  August 24, 1969

  The county fair smells of cotton candy, popcorn, and animal dung. Cass wrinkles her nose at the smell; the suburbanites of her hometown of Chagrin Falls drive to Amish country or go to the Apple Butter Festival. Manure doesn’t accompany the rural pleasures she’s used to.

  Ron steps out of the driver’s side of his tail-finned Chevy. He holds the door for Dana, who climbs awkwardly from the back seat as Little Stevie Wonder plays the harmonica on the car radio. Once out of the car, Dana looks down at her sandaled feet and realizes she’s made a mistake. She takes one step, then lifts a foot to shake out a piece of gravel. “Damn,” she mutters.

  The station wagon pulls up alongside Ron’s car. It’s a huge, two-toned, green monster that can hold six people and four cardboard boxes filled with flyers. The students call it the Green Bomb; it belongs to Kenny’s father, but Jan drives because Kenny only has a learner’s permit. Jan slams on the brake, pulls up the emergency even though the ground is flat, and hops out of the car to the accompaniment of the Mothers of Invention.

  Kenny runs around to the back, ready to start lifting the heavy canister propped up against the side wall. Ron steps over to join him.

  Tarky’s VW bug, which proudly bears four antiwar bumper stickers, scoots into the parking lot. He and Wes are squeezed into the tiny front seat. Behind them, Rap swings his motorcycle around in a gravel-spraying circle before pulling up alongside the little car Tarky named Eva Braun.

  “The canister all ready to go?” Rap calls. He wears no helmet; his long hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

  Kenny nods.

  Rap puts down the kickstand and steps over to the station wagon. At six feet, he towers over Kenny. He stands a fraction too close to the boy and says, “Are you sure this thing is safe?”

  Kenny nods again. “Jan and I took it out to an old quarry on Centennial Road,” he says. “I opened it and we poured the parathion into a hole and covered it with stones. Then we took the canister and cleaned it out six times. Then we put in the pepper oil.”

  “Great,” Rap says, giving Kenny a punch on the arm that will probably leave a bruise. “Let’s get this fucker out of here and head for the pig stall or whatever.”

  “It’s not the pig stall,�
� Tarky corrects. He’s the logistics expert, although he looks incongruous with his long curly hair in a headband and his hands around a clipboard. “We’re going to demonstrate at the main tent in ten minutes. Ted’s already there with the press. With any luck, we’ll get a photo in the Blade and a story on local television. Plus there’s a radio station doing a location spot on the midway.”

  “You chicks got the flyers?” Rap asks. Dana reaches in and pulls out a cardboard box. She and Cass spent the previous afternoon running the copies off the machine in Dana’s father’s law office.

  Dana hands a pile of paper to Jan and Cass, then takes one for herself. Cass gives a little nod of satisfaction as she looks down at the grainy photograph that fills the top half of the sheet. It is the picture of Belita that Ted managed to get printed in the Blade. Under it, in large bold letters, is the question: If this were your child, would you spray your fields with deadly poison?

  Rap reaches for the nozzled tube that will spray the pepper oil on the crowd. He attaches it to the canister and lifts it out of the back of the wagon.

  The chicks carry the flyers, nestling them in the crooks of their arms, the way they carried their books home from fifth grade. The guys follow behind, Rap straining under the weight of the canister. Wes, Tarky, and Ron swing megaphones from their arms. Kenny, empty-handed, trails behind the others.

  Ron digs into his pocket for the admission fee at the checkpoint between parking lot and fair, paying for everyone and taking a roll of purple tickets. The Ferris wheel turns faster than Cass remembered; she feels sick just looking at its spinning neon presence. Screams of fear and delight fill the air, along with barrel organ music from the Gay Nineties.

  They march, grim-faced, through the midway, ignoring the calls of food vendors to try the bratwurst or the saltwater taffy. The food smells add to Cass’s nausea. Stage fright, she realizes as they pass the “Made in Ohio” tent, which promises such local delicacies as marble longhorn cheese, Catawba wine, and black popcorn. She is as nervous as if she were about to play Lady Macbeth—and didn’t know her lines.