She paused, took another labored breath, started to speak again. And as she talked, I was struck by the image of one of those itsy-bitsy garden spiders that decide to make their web not in some sensible corner, but in a gigantic space, a space so huge and far-fetched, in it one could fit two African Elephants end to end. Dad and I watched such a determined spider on our porch in Howard, Louisiana, and no matter how many times the wind unrigged the mooring, how many times the web buckled and sagged, unable to hold itself up between the fake columns, the spider went on with its work, climbing to the top, free-falling, silk thread trembling behind it, dental floss in the wind. "She's making sense of the world," Dad said. "She's sewing it together as best she can."
"We still don't know how she managed it," Ada went on. "My father was two hundred and forty pounds. It had to be poison. She injected him with something, between his toes... cyanide maybe. 'Course the police swore they checked all that and there was no sign. I just don't see how it was possible. He liked his whiskey . . . won't lie about that. And there was his medication — " "What kind of medication was it?" I asked.
"Minipress. For blood pressure. Dr. Nixley told him you're not supposed to drink with it but he had before and it never messed with him. He drove home all by himself from the King of Hearts Fundraiser right when he first went on it and I was there when he got home. He was fine. Believe me, if I thought he wasn't fine I'd have caused a stink. Not that he would've listened."
"But Ada"— I kept my voice subdued, as if we were in a library—"I really don't think Hannah could've possibly—" "Gracey was in contact with her. He told her to kill Smoke. Like she'd done with all the others. She was the temptation, see." But— "She's the other one," she interrupted flatly. " 'Other than one other person.' The other member—weren't you listening?"
"But I know she's not a criminal. I talked to a detective here—"
"Hannah Schneider's not her real name. She ripped it off a poor missing woman who grew up in an orphanage in New Jersey. She's been livin' as that girl for years. Her real name's Catherine Baker and she's wanted by the FBI for shootin' a police officer right between the eyes. Twice. Somewhere in Texas." She cleared her throat. "Smoke didn't recognize her because no one's sure what Baker actually looks like. 'Specially now. They have old testimony, a composite that's twenty years old—in the eighties everyone had weird hair, freaky looks—you know those awful leftover hippies. And she's blond in the sketch. Says she has blue eyes. Smoke had the picture, along with the stuff on George Gracey. But it's one of those things—it could be a drawin' of me, you know. Could be a drawin' of anyone."
"Could you send me copies of his notes? For research purposes?"
Ada sniffed and though she didn't exactly agree to send them I gave her my mailing address. Neither of us spoke for a minute or two. I could hear the end credits of the soap opera, the outburst of another commercial.
"I just wish I'd been there," she said faintly. "I have a sixth sense, see. If I'd gone to the Auto Show, I could've gone in with him when he went to get the gum. I would've seen what she was doin'—prancin' by in tight jeans, sunglasses, pretendin' it was a coincidence. Cal swore he saw her a couple days before, too, when he and Smoke were in Winn-Dixie pickin' up ribs. He said she walked right by with her empty shoppin' cart, all gussied up like she was goin' somewhere, and she looked straight at Cal, grinned like the Devil himself. 'Course, there's no way of knowin' for sure. It gets busy on Sundays—" "What did you say?" I asked quietly. She stopped talking. The abrupt change in my tone of voice must have
startled her. "I said there's no way of knowing" she said apprehensively. Without thinking, I hung up the phone.
31
Che Guevara talks to young People
The Nightwatchmen have always gone by a variety of names— Nachlicht, or "Nocturnal," in German, also Nie Schlafend, or "Never Sleeping." In French, they are Les Veilleurs de Nuit. Membership, in its supposed heyday, 1971 to 1980, is wholly unknown; some say it was twenty-five men and women across America; others claim over a thousand around the globe. Whatever the truth—and, alas, we may never know it—the movement is whispered about with greater enthusiasm today than at its zenith (an Internet search yields over 100,000 pages). Its present-day popularity as part history lesson, part fairy tale, is a testament to The Freedom Ideal, a dream to liberate all people, regardless of their race or creed, a dream that, no matter how fractured and cynical modern society becomes, will not die. Van Meer, "Nachlicht: Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting," Federal Forum, Vol. 10, Issue 5,1998
Dad had raised me to be a skeptical person, a person unconvinced until "the facts line up like chorus girls," and so I had not believed Ada Harvey— not until she'd described the Winn-Dixie incident (or perhaps a little before, with "tight jeans" and "sunglasses"); then, it'd sounded as if she were describing not Smoke and Cal in Winn-Dixie, but Dad and me at Fat Kat in September, when I'd first seen Hannah in Frozen Foods.
If that weren't enough to knock the wind out of me, she had to go entirely Southern Gothic, dragging the Devil and his grin into it, and whenever someone with a fudgethical Southern accent said devil, one inevitably felt they knew something one didn't—as Yam Chestley wrote in Dixiecrats (1979), "The South knows two things through and through: cornbread and Satan" (p. 166). After I hung up, my bedroom stalagmited with shadows, I stared at my CASE NOTES on which I'd written in famished handwriting Officer Coxley-style haiku (NIGHTWATCHMEN CATHERINE BAKER GRACEY).
My first thought was that Dad was dead.
He, too, had been Catherine Baker's target, because he, too, had been working on a book about Gracey (it was the logical explanation for Hannah stalking us the same way she'd stalked Smoke Harvey), or, if he wasn't at work on a book ("I'm not certain I have the stamina for another book," Dad admitted in a Bourbon Mood, a sad acknowledgment he never made in daylight), then an article, essay or lecture of some kind, his own Nocturnal Conspiracy.
Of course—I ran across the room to switch on the overhead light and thankfully, the shadows were instantly whisked away like out-of-fashion black dresses in a department store —I reminded myself, Hannah Schneider was dead (the petit four of truth I knew for certain) and Dad was safe with Professor Arnie Sanderson at Piazza Pitti, an Italian restaurant in downtown Stock-ton. Still, I felt the need to hear his sandpaper voice, his "Sweet, don't be preposterous." I ran downstairs, tore through the Yellow Pages and dialed the restaurant. (Dad didn't have a cell phone; "So I may be available to others twenty-four hours, seven days a week like some minimum-waged dunderhead working in Customer Service? Much obliged, but no thank you.") It took only a minute for the hostess to identify him; few sported Irish tweed in spring.
"Sweet?" He was alarmed. "What's happened?"
"Nothing—well, everything. Are you okay?"
"What—of course. What's the matter?"
"Nothing." A paranoid thought occurred to me. "Do you trust Arnie Sanderson? Maybe you shouldn't leave your food unattended. Don't get up to go to the bathroom — "
"What?"
"I've discovered the truth about Hannah Schneider. I know why someone killed her, or-or she killed herself—I haven't quite figured that part out yet, but I know why"
Dad was silent, obviously not only weary of the name, but thoroughly unconvinced. Not that I blamed him; my breathing was a madwoman's, my heart was teetering like a wino in a jail cell—altogether an unconvincing figure of truth and forethought.
"Sweet," he said gently, "you know, I dropped off Gone with the Wind earlier this afternoon. Perhaps you should watch it. Have a piece of that chocolate cake. I should be no more than an hour." He began to say something more, something that started with, "Hannah," but that word yoga-twisted in his mouth so it came out "hands"; he seemed afraid to say her name, in case it encouraged me. "You sure you're all right? I can leave now"
"No, I'm fine," I said quickly. "We'll talk when you get home."
I hung up (infinitely reassured; Dad's voice was a pack of ice on a
sprain). I collected my CASE NOTES and raced downstairs to the kitchen to brew some coffee. ("Experience, intellectual prowess, forensics, fingerprints, footprints—sure, they're important," wrote Officer Christina Vericault on
p. 4 of The Last Uniform [1982]. "But the essential element of crime solving is a fine French Roast or Colombian blend. No murder will be solved without it.") After jotting down a few additional details from the Ada Harvey conversation, I hurried downstairs to Dad's study, switching on the lights.
Dad had only written one relatively short piece about The Nightwatchmen, published in 1998, "Nachtlich: Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting." Every now and then, too, for his Civil War seminars, he included on reading lists a more extensive commentary about their methodologies, an essay out of Herbert Littleton's Anatomy of Materialism (1990), "The Nightwatchmen and Mythical Principles of Practical Change." With little trouble, I located both on the bookshelf (Dad always purchased five copies of any Federal Forum issue in which he was featured, not unlike a paparazzi-hungry starlet when her picture graces "Around Town" in Celebrastory Weekly).
I returned to Dad's desk with the two publications. To the left of his laptop sat a hefty stack of legal pads and various folded foreign newspapers. Curious, I paged through them, my eyes having to adjust to decode his barbed-wire handwriting. Unfortunately, their subject matter had nothing to do with The Nightwatchmen or the whereabouts of George Gracey (thus paralleling Smoke's story like a dream). Instead, they featured Dad's obvious cause célèbre, civil upheaval in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other nations of Central Africa. "When Will Killing Stop?" demanded the awkwardly translated editorials in Afrikaan News, the small Cape Town political newspaper. "Where Is Champion for Freedom?"
I put those papers aside (returning them to their original order; Dad knew snooping the way dogs smell fear) and began my orderly investigation into The Nightwatchmen (or "Mai addormentato" as they were called in Italian). First, I read Dad's Federal Forum article. Second, I browsed the long-winded Chapter 19 in the Littleton book. Lastly, I turned on Dad's laptop and searched for the group on the Internet.
In the years since 1998, the number of pages referencing the radicals had mushroomed; the 100,000 had become 500,000.1 scanned as much as I could, no resource excluded for bias, romanticism or even conjecture ("Within prejudice grows all kinds of remarkable truths," Dad said): encyclopedias, history texts, political Web sites, Leftist blogs, Communist and Neo-Marxist sites (a favorite, www.thehairyman.com—alluding to Karl Marx's lionlike appearance), conspiracy and anarchist Web sites, sites about cartels, cults, hero worship, urban legends, organized crime, Orwell, Malcolm X, Erin Brockovich and something out of Nicaragua called Champions of Che. It seemed the group was like Greta Garbo when she first went into retirement: mysterious, impossible to pin down and everyone wanted a piece of her.
It took me a little over an hour to look through everything.
When I finished, my eyes were red, my throat dry. I felt drained and yet—scandalously alive (pronounced "a-LIVE"), giddy as the bright green Darning Needle Dragonfly that careened into Dad's hair at Lake Pennebaker, making him dance like a marionette, go "Ahhhhh!" and barge through a crowd of geriatrics wearing yellow visors identical to the yellow halo Christ sports in old frescoes.
My heart-thumping excitement was not simply because I knew so much about The Nightwatchmen I felt oddly confident I could deliver a Dadified lecture on them, my voice a tidal wave, rising up, up over the shabbily combed heads of his students, and not because, rather incredibly, Ada Harvey's information had held up heroically upon further examination like the British blockade against the Germans in the First Battle of the Atlantic during World War I. My exhilaration wasn't even because Hannah Schneider—all that she'd done, her strange behaviors, her lies—had suddenly come crashing open at my feet like the outer stone sarcophagus of Pharaoh Heteraah-mes when Carlson Quay Meade, in 1927, fumbled his way through a murky mummy cache high up in the cliffs of the Valley of the Kings. (For the first time, I could crouch down, take my oil lantern directly to Hannah's bone-smooth face, see, in startling detail, its every angle and plane.)
It was something else, too, something Dad once said after recounting those final hours in the life of Che Guevara. "There is something intoxicating about the dream of liberty and those who risked their lives for it—particularly in this whiny day and age, when people can barely manage to roll off their Barcalounger to answer a doorbell for a pizza delivery, much less a cry for freedom."
I'd solved it.
I couldn't believe it. I'd recovered the values of both x and y (with the vital assistance of Ada Harvey; I wasn't vain like many applied mathematicians, desperate to appear unaccompanied in the Annals of History). And I felt both terror and awe—what Einstein experienced in the middle of the night in 1905 in Bern, Switzerland, after waking from a nightmare in which he'd witnessed two pulsing stars crashing together creating strange waves in space—a vision that would inspire his General Theory of Relativity.
"It vas ze sceriest end most beautiful sing I haf ever seen," he said.
I hurried over to Dad's bookshelf again, this time pulling Colonel Helig's treatise on murder from the shelf, Machinations Idyllic and Unseen (1889). I paged through it (so old, pages 1-22 dandruffed out of the spine), searching for the passages that would cast the last puddles of light on this sprawling truth I'd uncovered, this surprising—and obviously, treacherous—New World.
The oddest insight into the workings of The Nightwatchmen (an incident Dad would deem evidence of "a legend's potential to be worn like a trench coat, used for good, warding off the rain, and evil, streaking through a park, frightening children") was an episode detailed on www.goodrebels .net/nw, in which two eighth graders from an affluent Houston suburb committed suicide together on January 14,1995. One of them, a thirteen-year-old girl, had written a suicide note—posted on the Web site—and in stark handwriting, on frighteningly sweet stationery (pink, rainbows) she'd written: "We hereby eliminate our selfs in the name of The Nightwatch Men and to show our parents their money is dirty. Death to all oil pigs."
The creator of the site (when you clicked on "About Randy" he revealed himself to be an emaciated woolly-mammoth type with a serious red mouth zipped tightly into his face, of indeterminate age) complained about this, the "heritage" of The Nightwatchmen being abused in such a fashion, because "nowhere in their manifestos do they say kill yourself because you're rich. They're champions against capitalist abuses, not wacko members of the Manson Family." "Death to all pigs," of course, was written in blood on the front door of Cielo Drive (see Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles Milles Manson, Ivys, 1985, p. 226).
According to most sources, Randy was correct; nowhere in the manifestos of Nachtlich did they urge suicide under any circumstance. In fact, there were no manifestos at all penned by the group, no pamphlets, brochures, outlines, recorded sound-bites or fervently worded essays detailing their intentions. (It was a choice Dad would deem remarkably astute: "If rebels never broadcast who they are, their enemies will never be sure of what they're fighting.") The only paper evidencing the group's existence was a single notebook page attributed to George Gracey, dated July 9, 1971, marking the birth of The Nightwatchmen—at least, as the nation, the police and the FBI knew it. (It wasn't a welcomed nativity; The Establishment already had their hands full with the Weather Underground, Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society, among a handful of other "hallucinating hippie quacks," as Dad called them.)
On that day in 1971, a Meade, West Virginia, policeman discovered this notebook page Scotch-taped to a telephone pole ten feet from where Senator Michael McCullough's white Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-five had exploded in a wealthy residential community known as Marlowe Gardens. (Senator Michael McCullough climbed inside and was killed instantly in the blast.)
The Nightwatchmen's sole manifesto could be read on www.mindfucks .net/gg (and Gracey was no Spelling Bee Winner): "Today di
es a crooked and gluttonus man" —it was true, at least literally; McCullough allegedly weighed three hundred pounds and suffered from scoliosis—"a man who gets rich by the suffering of women and children, a greedy man. And so I, and the many with me, will be The Nightwatchmen, helping to divest this nation and the world of the capitalistic greed contemptuous of human life, undermining democrisy, blindfolding its people, forcing them to live in the dark."
Dad and Herbert Littleton supplied insight into the objectives of The Nightwatchmen, inferred from the 1971 assassination, as well as Gracey's subsequent explosion of an office building in downtown Houston on October 29, 1973. Littleton reasoned Senator McCullough had become the group's first known assassination due to his involvement in a 1966 toxic waste scandal. Over seventy tons of toxic waste had been dumped illegally into the West Virginia Pooley River by Shohawk Industries, a textiles manufacturing plant, and by 1965, the tiny, impoverished coal mining towns of Beudde and Morrisville had suffered an increase in cancer among its low-income population. When the scandal broke, McCullough, then the governor, voiced his outrage and grief and his highly publicized, heroic mandate to clean up the river, never mind the price tag (what it cost taxpayers), had won him a seat in the senate the following election year (see "Governor McCullough Visits Five-year-old Boy with Leukemia," Anatomy, Littleton, p. 193).
In truth, however, in 1989, Littleton exposed McCullough had not only known about the dumping, and the toll it would take on the communities downstream, but he'd actually been well compensated for keeping mum, an amount estimated between $500,000 and $750,000.
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