Just outside of Springfield, we did just that. The invasion of young people into the restaurant, a good share of them black, got some wide-eyed looks from the farmers and truckers here on the outskirts of this town Abraham Lincoln had called home. All the staffers streamed in and found tables and booths. I wound up in one of the latter with Ruth, room for four but nobody made a move to join us.
“Is it my breath?” I asked her, peering over the top of a menu.
“No. It’s the company you keep.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m a sort of pariah.”
“What does that mean?”
“Outcast.”
“Because you’re Raymond’s girl, you mean.”
She dropped her menu and her cheeks turned an attractive shade of maroon.
Leaning toward me with a stricken expression, she whispered, “Who…who have you been talking to?”
“You. You call him Raymond, not ‘the Reverend,’ and the other day, when you saw his wife making a scene—people shouldn’t live in glass offices—you damn near cried.”
She was about damn near crying now.
She started to slide out of the booth and I reached out and took her by a wrist. Not hard, just enough to stop her, and get her to look at me.
“Please don’t,” I said. “Don’t give the assholes anything else to talk about. I apologize for bringing it up.”
She froze. Swallowed. Nodded. Slid back into the booth. Trembling some.
I ordered the meatloaf plate and a Coke and she had a small chef’s salad and sweet iced tea. We didn’t talk for a while. Halfway through the salad, she pushed it to one side, like it disgusted her, and then she leaned toward me again. Whispered again.
“It was…I hate the stupid word, but…a fling. We were together at work a lot, he was having trouble at home, I admired him, still do admire him, I could tell he liked me…and it just, you know…happened. It lasted all of a week and we both came to an awareness that there were things bigger and more important than both of us and our…petty desires.”
That sounded like somebody else’s words not hers. Somebody who had something in his pants that had gotten bigger than both of them.
“But you stayed on with the Coalition,” I said.
She nodded vigorously. “Yes. The cause really is more important than some personal relationship that…that…”
“Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Something from an old movie. When was this? The fling, the breakup?”
She sighed. “Last month. It’s been a strain at headquarters ever since. His wife wants…wants me fired…guess I can’t blame her…but so far Raymond has refused. I’m hoping I can just, just weather it.”
I raised my Coke glass. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
She lit up. “Oh. That movie.” She grinned but her eyes were moist. “I don’t think anybody ever looked at me and thought of Ingrid Bergman before.”
“Oh I don’t know. I think maybe there’s a Swede in the woodpile.”
Her mouth dropped like a trapdoor and she tried to be offended, but could only smile. “Jack, you can be so outrageous sometimes.”
“I’m out there, all right.”
Before we left the truckstop, I picked up a L’Amour novel that was new to me, The Broken Gun.
Back on the bus, the portable radio was playing, “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers, and she did, getting a little sleep now that the sun had gone down. I slipped an arm around her. God, she smelled good.
Now that I knew how that prick Lloyd had taken advantage of her, getting rid of him didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
EIGHT
About an hour and a half before the rally was to begin, the bus rolled into a lushly wooded campus that blazed with orange, yellow, red, purple, the dying sun cutting through dying leaves like it was jealous.
We were at the west end of DeKalb, a modest farm community, but every college campus is a world of its own and Northern Illinois University was no exception. The student union was a couple of modernistic glass-and-stone floors with a sudden skyscraper at the left end, like a Howard Johnson’s had turned abruptly into the UN.
That add-on obelisk was mostly hotel, the eighth through fourteenth floors anyway, nine rooms each, most of which the Coalition had booked. Through crisp football weather, staffers and their suitcases moved from parking lot into the student center and checked in at the front desk off the lobby; with that busload it took a while.
It was two to each reservation, but I’d been a late addition and wound up with a Holiday Inn-like room of my own, on the twelfth floor. I freshened up but did not change my clothes, and collected Ruth and went down to a central café called the Pow Wow for a bite before the rally.
The place was packed, every table taken, so we joined an overflow of kids carrying their burgers, fries and Cokes into a nearby lounge with walls of that same rec-room paneling I’d seen at the Nazi church. We snagged side-by-side orange-cushioned metal chairs, turning sideways to eat off a small white table between us. The food was barely edible, but we wolfed it.
“I don’t see any sign of either man of the hour,” I said, between bites of burger.
Ruth had changed into a Zebra-print maxi-dress that hugged her slender curves. Oversize hoop earrings again, dark eye shadow, very red lip gloss. She was a stunning young woman and a lot of eyes found her, standing out as she did among this mix of sweatshirt-and-jeans college kids and Coalition staffers in Brady Bunch colors and bells.
“Mr. Nimoy and the Reverend,” she said (avoiding calling Lloyd “Raymond” now), “are meeting with the black student group who invited them. They’ll each make an entrance at the rally. Anyway, if they walked through here, it’d start a riot.”
She didn’t mean race riot—she meant the young people among us who wore LIVE LONG AND PROSPER t-shirts.
I said, “I’m a little surprised no Nixon supporters were around when we got here.”
She shrugged. “They’ll probably be out there by now. On either side of the sidewalk, an idiot gauntlet for attendees to run. But, really, we haven’t run into too much trouble lately.”
I figured that was because Nixon was so far ahead in the polls, but kept it to myself.
“For having two such famous guests,” she said, licking mayonnaise from a plump red upper lip (get your mind out of the gutter), “the college hasn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet.”
“No red carpet even for reds?”
She smiled a little. “Not even for reds. They have a lovely auditorium here, I understand. It’s sitting empty tonight. So is the ballroom upstairs. Meanwhile, we’ll be in the cellar.”
Soon enough we were down there, in a low-ceilinged, tiled-floor, gray-walled space about the size of a grade-school gymnasium. Vending machines lined one wall like hoods waiting for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to start; some couches and chairs were pushed against the other walls, indicating this was a rearranged lounge area. Maybe fifty folding chairs (with standing room behind) faced a small riser with a microphone on a stand and no podium. A wall-draped McGOVERN FOR PRESIDENT banner, white letters on blue, provided a backdrop.
As staffers, we were let in early by members of the black group sponsoring the event. Security was limited to a pair of DeKalb-uniformed cops and a trio of light-blue-uniformed NIU security guards. The whole thing was feeling a little half-hearted and sad to me, but when the doors opened, kids came pouring in. The fifty folding chairs were gone faster than life-boats on a sinking ship, which was maybe fitting for the McGovern campaign.
The Coalition staffers, most of whom were not much older than these college kids, didn’t take any of the chairs, spreading themselves among those who wound up in the standing-room area. As the audience buzzed and settled into their seats, a recording of “Abraham, Martin and John” came over the scratchy sound system.
“Is that Nimoy singing?” I asked Ruth, who was standing
beside me.
She nodded.
It didn’t suck, but the Star Trek contingent among us—likely the majority—began to whoop and applaud as if the Beatles had showed up suddenly to rescind their break-up and run through a few numbers.
As the song finished, Nimoy—in a gray turtleneck and blue jeans—came in and strolled to the little stage, smiling, nodding, waving. With his shaggy sideburned hair and square-lensed glasses, he looked more like the hippest professor on campus than a TV star. The folding-chair winners were on their feet, clapping, whistling, hooting, and he gave them the Vulcan salute—palm out, middle finger and ring finger parted, thumb extended.
With that same hand, he settled everybody down, and when somebody started to dim the lights, he asked for them to stay up.
“I am not a politician,” he said into the microphone. “I don’t have to support local candidates if I don’t believe in them. But I’m here to tell you why I’ve visited thirty states, campaigning for George McGovern.”
He was unpretentious and low-key and easy to listen to, but my focus was on the crowd—probably around two hundred of us in here—to see if there were any interlopers, any troublemakers. If there were, and I could handle them without much fuss, that would get me points and closer to the inner circle. But almost everybody here looked like a college kid or a little younger or a little older, and it was clear this was more a Star Trek event than a George McGovern one, not that those were mutually exclusive.
Only two guys looked wrong to me.
They were white, pushing thirty, and had on hippie-ish attire that tried a little too hard, tie-dye headbands, leather fringed vests, peace-symbol t-shirts, patched jeans. What really gave it away was how similar their get-ups were. I say get-ups because two possibilities struck me: they were in the same rock band or were undercover cops.
They whispered now and then, smiling and chuckling as they shared private jokes. For guys with peace symbols, they didn’t seem terribly interested in Mr. Spock pushing an anti-war presidential candidate.
Right now the actor was talking about how he sensed a real build-up of enthusiasm for McGovern, not just from new, under-twenty-one voters, but from labor, farmers and senior citizens.
“Of course I’m at a disadvantage,” the actor said with a grin. “I’ve spent most of my previous life on Vulcan, so I don’t know too much about the people in this country.”
I was also keeping my eye on that tall, pockmarked, skin-and-bones staffer—his name, I’d learned, was André—who didn’t seem to do much of anything at the office yet was always around, pretending to keep busy. He was toward the front of standing room to my left, on the edge of the crowd, fairly close to the door. All in black—black sports jacket, pointy-collar black shirt, wide black big-buckle belt, black leather pants, pointed black boots—as if he’d hoped to disappear in a dark room. But the speaker had double-crossed him, keeping the lights on….
Nimoy was wrapping up with strong words about that Watergate mess on the news. “It’s more than political trickery or even espionage,” he was saying. “It’s sabotage linked to the Oval Office.”
That maybe showed how desperate this campaign was getting, making a production out of a chickenshit burglary.
Then Nimoy gave his co-star a big build-up—Reverend Lloyd, that is, not William Shatner—likening him to Ralph Bunch and Martin Luther King. And between the Trekkies and the Coalition staffers, Lloyd got damn near as warm a welcome as Mr. Spock, if minus the whistles and hoots and hollers.
Six feet or better, in a black suit and black-and-red tie, movie-star handsome—if that movie star was Richard Roundtree, anyway—Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd strode in with his two tall black, black-suited bodyguards following. They peeled off to position themselves at the entry’s either side like eunuchs guarding a harem, and the Reverend strode to the stage, oozing strength, confidence, charisma. He joined Nimoy, who was leading the applause. The two men exchanged handshakes and respectful nods, and Nimoy disappeared down into the audience, where a front-row folding chair awaited.
The applause continued, as the commanding figure stood before the McGOVERN banner exuding the confidence of General Patton in front of a big fat fucking American flag. He smiled, showing some startlingly white teeth, and gave a little head bow to sections of the crowd. I guess he’d been on the news enough to deserve this kind of recognition and response. But it still sort of surprised me.
He had a bass voice with rumbling resonance and spoke with the sharp articulation of a ghetto kid who’d trained himself to sound damn near Shakespearean. He acknowledged Nimoy, making a remark about Vulcans being “a minority group underrepresented in government,” and began to speak with a rolling kind of poetry that made it hard to pay attention to the actual content.
Standing at the microphone (but not holding onto it as the actor had), head back, eyes unblinking, he said, “Senator McGovern is a warrior, a war hero of yesterday who brings courage today to the battle against poverty and hunger, to the fight against political dishonesty and warmongering, to the never-ending struggle between right and wrong. His is a voice for reform, to inspire the Democratic party to bring about greater participation from blacks and browns and women and young people!”
André slipped out the door, between the two bodyguards, who paid him no heed. Maybe he was going out for a smoke—it wasn’t allowed in many areas of the student union, including this one—or maybe he’d just heard all of this before. Hell, he might just be making a quick trip to the john.
But I didn’t think so.
“We must band together, become a coalition of many colors….”
Now the pair of fake hippies exited together, out the door on the opposite side of the room.
“Why this effort to end the war at this time, during an election year? Why not four years ago? Before Cambodia? Before Laos? Before so much blood and treasure had been tossed heedlessly to the winds of time?”
I went out the way André had, though I did earn glances from the harem eunuchs. You have to watch these white boys, you know, even when they’re on your team. I went up the stairs two at a time, crossed the lobby.
At the front double doors, I glanced out and, as Ruth had predicted, Nixon supporters were lined up on either side of the sidewalk—maybe a dozen, with their placards shouldered: NIXON’S THE ONE; RIGHT ON, MR. PRESIDENT; RE-ELECT THE PRESIDENT; and (my favorite) YOU CAN’T LICK OUR DICK. They were in their thirties and forties primarily, though several in their twenties wore Army jackets.
No way I was going down that receiving line, looking this much like a real college student. More to the point, I didn’t think André had either, or the fake hippies, who might be cops after all, tagging after him to make a drug bust.
If Reverend Lloyd really was funding his efforts by distributing dope via his speaking tours, André seemed the perfect candidate for carrying the ball for him. He had that emaciated druggie look, which I didn’t detect on any of the other staffers.
Oh, many of the Reverend’s young troops were into weed, no doubt—yesterday afternoon, Harold Jackson had given them a loud reminder at headquarters that no “mowing the grass” would be tolerated on this overnight, and that included “behind closed doors—your hotel rooms are on university property!”
He’d even taken me aside, the new kid, to emphasize the same point. “Mr. Blake, you get caught blastin’ a joint, we all go down. Remember that, son.”
I hadn’t smoked weed since Vietnam and not much of it at that. A sniper has to have an edge. Mellow is not a good state of mind when you’re killing people.
So I’d assured Big Chief Second-in-Command of my chronic lack of interest…only now I seemed to be about to learn whether the Coalition’s ’48 Greyhound had been transporting more than just politically active young people.
Looking past the lined-up Nixon lovers, however, taking in the parking lot, I didn’t see the bus anywhere. Earlier, the vehicle had let us out at the curb, but apparently had not managed to
get itself parked in the big lot, which wasn’t nearly full.
At the lobby’s hotel desk, a kid in a blazer with a GO HUSKIES button told me buses sometimes parked around on the west end of the building. His pointing finger led to me more double doors, where I looked out and indeed saw the blue-and-silver bus, parked midway in a lot, well away from a few cars parked near the curb. André stood at the door of the big vehicle, which he appeared to be unlocking. No sign of the Mod Squad.
He went up inside.
Maybe two minutes later, André came down out of the bus and locked the door behind him. The way he walked said something was tucked under his black sports jacket, beneath his left arm. Damn, he seemed to be making a beeline right toward me.
Not that he’d seen me—I was plastered next to the doors, along one side, just peeking out. But he was up to the curb-parked cars now and maybe I should split.
Then—from somewhere off to my right, where they’d sat in a car maybe, or just waited by the building—came the two fake hippies. They approached him quickly.
So it was a bust…
…only it wasn’t.
Right there on the sidewalk, so close I could have burst through the doors and jumped them, André carefully withdrew a plump paper sack, its top folded over, about big enough for a couple loaves of bread. But I didn’t figure what he handed the pair was bread.
Speaking of which, they gave André a fat envelope in exchange, which the skinny staffer opened to riffle through two inches of green, not counting, just confirming.
For one dumb moment, I thought, They’re dirty cops, but then I realized in a saner second that they weren’t any more cops than they were hippies. André was the mule making a delivery, and they were just picking up the goods.
Flunkies.
Like André.
Whose boss was downstairs, his manner majestic, his words stirring, as he built up the hopes of a bunch of college kids and science-fiction dorks, telling them how they could make the world a better, safer place.
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