The space they worked in had once been a warehouse with second story offices. Their diligent efforts, which now flavored the air with their sweat, had reduced the storehouse area considerably. The remainder was consigned to a Caribbean import/export business that intended to move in as soon as they put up the final wall. Jack’o’Hearts had set up the Center’s speakers in the work area, and DJ Elijah’s Liberation News Service on Liberation Station Afrika blared out over them.
“...Anti-war protesters and self-styled Hooligans continue to battle police along the eastern end of Market in downtown San Francisco’s financial district. So far, the SFPD has managed to confine the street fighting to the area immediately around the Embarcadero peace rally.
“In other news, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a class action suit today against six midwest family planning clinics for sterilizing 484 welfare mothers under false pretences after providing the women abortions. Sylvester Carmichael, who became Director of the SPLC after Victor Jackson was assassinated by the Aryan Revolutionary Movement two years ago, is scheduled to speak at a New Orleans press conference at 5...”
“How you think you’ll go out?” Jack’o’Hearts asked, pounding in his own nail.
DL straightened up, wiped his forehead with the back of his left hand, and balanced his hammer over his fingers. His body did not show his prison conditioning, the muscles strong but unobtrusive. This, plus the fact that he was an inch shorter than average in height, and many people underestimated him in a fight. He looked upon the world through lively light brown eyes. His skin was dark brown, his hair was cut short and his smile was engaging despite a missing front tooth. A scar ran down his left cheek, reminder of a knife fight he had almost lost. DL had been born in Harlem, winding up in Oakland at five when his family moved to the west coast looking for work. Both mom and dad worked, so he had been raised by his black Cuban grandmother with a brother fifteen years older destined to die a soldier in Lebanon, and a sister six years older destined to marry up and disown her family of origin. Granny had taught him Spanish, a handy skill he had used often in dealing with the vatos on his turf. He wore construction boots, faded black jeans and white t-shirt; a striking symbol— black, green, and gold stars on a blood red background—silk-screened on the shirt’s back.
“When the Afrikan Lords be gangbangin’, figured I’d go out with a bullet in the heart,” DL smiled, “Pig bullet, bangin’ bullet, it didn’t matter. Now, with us doin’ the Center, well, I don’t know.”
“Maybe we’ll both die o’ ol’ age,” Jack’o’Hearts laughed, doing a stooped over, arthritic caricature of an old man as he shambled over to pick up another 2x4, his voice changing from rich tenor to that of a toothless oldster.
“We should be so lucky,” DL laughed along. He had never heard of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, Jeff Fort or the Black P. Stone Nation, the Young Lords Party or the Almighty Latin King Nation, and only recently had he learned of Fred Hampton. Ghosts walking the same road.
FIVE
Gregory Patrick Kovinski had made his polite exit from a half-million-strong peace march settled into a rally along the Embarcadero an hour and a half before. Just in time to escape the endless series of boring, PC speeches by spokespeople for everyone and everything in what was nebulously called “the progressive movement.” Had he known that groups of black masked autonomists and anarchists, Hooligans all, would also get antsy, finally to spark thousands of other young people to take to the streets in direct action and riot, he might have hung around. As it was he had cleared the Golden Gate on his drive home when he heard of the demonstration’s militant turn from public radio; the story after the Piccoli gem heist and before the Ukrainian cruise bombing of Moscow.
Clouds thickened for a storm. The ride was brisk in his classic 1968 Triumph Spitfire, Greg’s summer rebuild. The air shredded with the smell of the bay on the way into San Rafael, shading into forest smells after he turned up Lucas Valley Road. Walled suburb alternated with mini-mall until the turn on County Road G18. His home town was some 11 miles north of Mill Valley as the crow flew, between wealthy hyper-suburban Marinwood and a more reclusive/exclusive Woodacre, directly north of Loma Alta mountain. The area had once been an Ohlone village, stumbled upon by Portóla in 1771. It was named Alabaster later, for the white rock outcroppings on the mountain’s north face. A collection of farm houses and a general store by 1850, it became a respectable, modest agricultural community by 1940, specializing in truck farming and poultry. In 1980, the agriculturally/vocationally oriented Alabaster State University, part of the CSU system, was established in the town, augmenting and replacing the already existing junior college. And California’s governor proclaimed Alabaster a “model modern agricultural community” in the year 2000. As he wheeled onto Alabaster’s Main Street at 1:20, Greg decided to check his campus mailbox at Merrick Cluster College, on Alabaster State University, before going home.
He ran back down the campus post office steps. He jumped into his car, revved the engine violently, and squealed recklessly out of the parking lot. Thick white clouds, underbellied dark and portending rain, lumbered across the afternoon sky. Greg turned, tires screaming, out of the university grounds and back onto the streets of Alabaster. A large raven spread its wings and bounded up gently from a branch near the top of a thick needled pine ahead of Greg’s race west along Main Street. She spread her black wings wide to cruise parallel to the roaring little car for a time, a cool black eye briefly taking in the Spitfire and its driver before the slightest tilt of wing spiraled the raven away on a search for food.
Dear Greg,
I’m deeply sorry to have to write you this letter, but this way I can get everything I want to say said. You’re so good with arguments that I dreaded calling you on the phone to try and tell you. Greg, I’m in love with someone else. His name is Christopher, and I met him shortly after I started at Wellesley...
Greg took the turn east onto Foothill Scenic Drive at the split with San Gerónimo Valley Drive as might a Grand Prix driver. He was in a state of terrible revelation, the visceral experience of apocalypse. Everything, every little clue in the past three months of his life had suddenly fallen into place in a wrenching, illuminating flash. A painful, razor-edged whole. The changed tone to her letters and phone calls after her first month as a junior transfer. The sudden hesitancy as to her summer commitments. The male voice which occasionally answered her house’s phone. Her brief, aloof Christmas vacation home. The formal, almost stilted 21st birthday card she had sent him at the beginning of the month. Now it all made sense. He roared through the intersection with Sir Francis Drake Boulevard near Camp Arequipa, taking Foothill Scenic south along the coastal ranges as it generally paralleled the English pirate’s road to the east.
Broad leafed and sharp needled brush and trees blended into walls of variegated green along both sides of the road. Greg took a long straight-away, pedal to the floor. During her holiday home, she had been almost too busy to see him, what with family, shopping, relatives, trips to the city, and the like. He had managed, with a good deal of effort, to have her alone for one night of her vacation’s twenty, at his house with his father away on business. Their lovemaking had been strained and estranged, awkward and unsatisfying. Greg had been confused by her standoffishness and embarrassment. Tears now welled up into his eyes, a flood he held back, bitterly biting his lower lip.
...I know this will hurt you, but I can no longer hide my feelings. Since I moved to Boston, my perspective on things has changed profoundly. I still care for you deeply. But we were high school lovers, and ours was a high school relationship. My point of view has now broadened beyond Alabaster, and beyond the west coast. Christopher has been a crucial factor in my growth. He has widened my view of the world and allowed me to see how parochial my life was in Alabaster, and even in California. I still love you Greg. But I’ve come to realize that I love you as I would a brother. We grew up together, and our relationship came out of our familiarity. By c
ontrast, my relationship with Christopher is a love based on true passion...
Greg reacted entirely from the gut on his mad ride. Wounded, in pain, he drove headlong to his personal space, a secluded, calm place where invariably he had gone during crises in his life in order to think things through and sort out his feelings. He lifted his foot off the accelerator in approaching the hairpin, then started accelerating again a third of the way through the turn, keyed into the g-force as the car held onto the edge of a spin-out. Once through it, he suddenly slammed on the brakes. Too late, he felt the Spitfire fishtail as his right front wheel, then rear wheel, ran over the large, gray object near the road’s edge. Greg kept his head and quickly brought his car under control, momentarily jostled out of his raging emotions. He parked well onto the shoulder to catch his breath and dampen his adrenaline. He stepped out onto the gravel and crunched around, steadying his rampant breathing and shaking muscles.
Greg stood just under six feet tall, broad-shouldered in his brown leather flight jacket. He looked athletic, although he had not participated in organized sports since the swim and water polo teams his sophomore year of high school. His straight dark hair was cropped short, outlining broad Slavic features, high forehead and fiery green eyes. He ran a hand absently through his hair. Almost as an afterthought, he walked over to the object which had prompted the near accident.
It was a metal box. It was painted gray, with bright yellow lettering almost entirely covered by the road’s grit and his tires’ rubber. The box was about two and a half feet by one foot by two feet, well-machined with rounded edges not dented by impact with his car. It’s form-fitted lid fastened to the base at each end of its length with sophisticated locks. The whole thing rested on its side not far from where he had hit it. Greg noticed the skid marks of paint on asphalt from an impact point, indicating that the box originally had struck the road at some speed before his own encounter with it. It was also surprisingly massive and, in hefting it, he confirmed that the side to the road had been scraped clean, revealing scratched stainless steel. Greg carried the heavy object to his car where he loaded it into his trunk, absently, vaguely thinking to salvage the well-made box for his workshop.
He restarted the engine and eased back onto the asphalt, spitting gravel. Once driving again, he moderated his speed. The road widened, and walled suburban tracts sprouted up on either side, in the solemn shadows of the mountains. He glimpsed the bay to the east, the northern Bay Area landscape checkered with strong sun through broken clouds. He passed two cars on a straightway. Once again, his anguish and anger boiled up.
He had never considered a corresponding junior transfer to follow her to the east coast. ASUs technical departments were rated quite high, more than sufficient for his education. He majored in electronic engineering and minored in biochemical engineering. What is more, he was a homeboy. Not born, but raised in Alabaster since three years old, he had lived close enough to The City to have experienced the metropolis in full. He did not like it that much. Nowhere near enough to move to the hyper sprawl of the east coast. He had joined the Sierra Club’s John Muir Back Pack Society after Scouting, out of his love for wilderness, an interest that Janet had seemed to share. They had solemnly promised each other in September that this “temporary” separation would only strengthen their love, all the while planning their epic “Pacific Crest Trail” hike for the summer to come. It had taken her barely one month to abandon their five year relationship. Greg’s sense of betrayal was acid.
...Greg, I still want us to be friends, if we can. You were a very important part of my life in Alabaster. I don’t want to avoid you when I come back to visit. I hope we can both be adult about this. But, if you feel too hurt by what has happened to be my friend for a while, I will understand. I will always be here for you to talk to, so please do not feel that I’ve abandoned you. You will always be my dear friend.
Love Janet
The incidence of suburbia increased as Greg approached Mount Tamalpais, clotting into guarded bedroom communities and hardening into the occasional telescanned mini-mall and yuppie professional center. Somewhere above Corte Madera, between Larkspur and Mill Valley, he recognized and turned onto a side street. He drove through a stratum of exclusive, expensive housing—secluded, terraced homes with acreage and views—until both street and urbanization ended in the State Park’s fence. Greg parked and searched under the passenger’s seat for a small, black leather pouch, which he pocketed in his jacket. The gated fire road was easy to enter by climbing over, once he put the hood up on his car. He took a side trail almost immediately, into the thickening forest, until all sight and most sound of the suburbs melted away behind him.
The brisk hike normally took over an hour. Greg made it in a little under 45 minutes, fueled by his emotional fury, and the once removed state in which it placed him. His meadow on the slopes of East Peak opened into a modest clearing of wind tossed grass. Once he located the old pine stump near its western edge the meadow revealed a panorama of urbanization given a kind of beauty by distance. The crisp winter air was remarkably clear of smog and haze. Mount Diablo bracketed the northern Bay Area in the east, and the far-off, purple edge of the Sierra Nevadas cut the horizon, at times merging with looming banks of dark thunderheads.
The meadow had been a refuge for Greg more than once since he had hiked upon it at twelve, a Boy Scout second class trying to come to terms with his parents’ divorce. He had returned to the meadow’s serenity at fourteen after his favorite uncle, Stephen, died of cancer, and again at sixteen when his best friend in high school, Toby Wallace, committed suicide by hanging himself in the boy’s locker room at the school gym. The meadow’s calm had afforded him the space to decide not to register for the draft when he turned 18 in high school, and he had sought its solitude at 19 to come to terms with Janet’s decision to abort their unintended pregnancy. Now this peaceful enclosure served as the stage upon which he needed to thrash out Janet’s unfaithfulness.
He had about two hours of daylight and a half hour of dusk left. Time at least to start. He sat cross-legged on the wide stump, and withdrew the small pouch. He removed a plastic film case, a small wooden and brass pipe, and a book of matches. He extracted a fragrant bud of sensimilla from the film case, crushed it into the pipe bowl with his thumb, and lit a match. He folded rich, spicy marijuana smoke into his lungs with a deep intake of breath. The high, like a soft furry bubble, rose up from his lungs, nuzzled into his brain, and ever-so-gently popped among the neural synapses there. The waning sunlight brothed up golden, accentuating the objects around him. Bird song and insect noise deepened into profundity. The smells of pine and sage under-toned the burning marijuana odor.
Greg imagined that he could project himself beyond the Sierra Nevadas now teething at storm clouds. Beyond the jagged Rockies, beyond the sluggish Mississippi, beyond the rolling Appalachians, to the grimy city of Boston. He reconstructed Janet’s face in the air before him; her long black curls, her cool blue eyes, and her smiling mouth. He imagined he could see her, hovering disembodied outside her room’s window. It was charred night in Boston, and she was not alone. Someone, a man was with her. Try as he might flitting outside her window in his imagination, Greg could not make out his face. But to his great agony, they were making love, savagely enjoying each other’s bodies and laughing with their shared pleasure.
Two things occurred in what Greg would remember thereafter as a single incident of synchronicity, an association forever welded together by THC resins. A great brown hawk took flight from a Douglas fir on the meadow’s edge and soared down a straight line toward Greg. Its wicked, powerful talons outstretched, the bird of prey lightly touched them to the top of the human’s head. With a flap of its broad wings it flew off, rising into the approaching sunset. He had not seen the hawk descend. As he gazed up watching the graceful bird arc away, and wondering what omen its touch had been, the racket began. It started off with an incomprehensible voice bellowing over a bullhorn. Greg always mi
stook the sound of gunfire for that of fireworks, and visa versa, so it sounded like the Chinese New Year had started up on the hillside below the meadow.
It did not take him long to realize that a full blown battle was under way, and nearby, replete with single-shot and automatic weaponry, not to mention the dull thuds of things exploding. Then he noticed white clouds, which he took to be tear gas, rising above the trees down to the east, accompanied by the distinctive sound of a helicopter taking off. Indeed, the throbbing rotary blade and tail of a chopper did eventually break the same line of trees amidst the whirling white clouds, but clearly it was in trouble. The helicopter pitched, yawed, shuddered and shook, seemed about to leap into the sky, only to suddenly crash back beneath the tree line in an ugly rending of metal. Percussive, fuel-fed explosions followed. A violent, greasy black smoke cloud punched into the air where the helicopter had been.
Greg stashed his paraphernalia and ran back full speed to his car, all thought of Janet momentarily expunged from his thoughts. He was flushed, sweating, and scratched up by the time he kicked over the engine to make the dash for home. Or tried to. Cops swarmed every street of the affluent foothill housing. He had to provide five separate roadblocks with his ID and an explanation about his presence in the area. The jumpy cops bristled with weapons, but they let him through without a hassle each time. They were not looking for him. And he was in no position, what with the contraband in his pocket, to harangue them about their “police state methods” or “governmental fascism.” He relied on the radio during the ride home for information.
Apparently, an alert citizen clued in the police that the Piccoli robbers might be holed up in a house in this elite section of the Bay Area. Sure enough, when the Highway Patrol made their move, a gunfight erupted, culminating in the thieves’ attempted escape by helicopter, evidently concealed on the grounds of the besieged house. The attempt had failed. The helicopter had been shot down. The Piccoli gems had been recovered intact. Most of the criminals were dead, killed in the helicopter’s crash, though the cops were searching for a fifth, unidentified individual. The radio report mentioned something about stolen riemanium, but Greg did not catch all of it.
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