First Papers (30 page)

Ernie’s wildness ignited the others. One tore up fistfuls of grass and threw them, like confetti at a Mardi gras, making patches of young green on top of the filth.

“Herbie, wait a minute,” somebody else shouted at the grass-flinger, “lemme get near the stinking anarchist son-of-a-bitch—I got a real great thing here.”

Herbie obligingly moved aside. “What real great thing, Bobbo?”

Bobbo did not answer. He was already kneeling on the dark earth, reaching for Reitman’s head, stabbing at his ears and neck with something he held in cautious ringers.

“Cactus?” Herbie said. “Them little acorny needly ones? By God, you’re the one, Bobbo!” And as Bobbo tried to jam the cactus more accurately into Reitman’s ear, Herbie begged and wheedled, “Save me a few for his anarchist asshole; don’t forget now, Bobbo.”

Paige rose uncertainly. He was sure he had not lost consciousness, even for a moment, but the semicircle of cars was gone, and with the cars, the armed lords of creation and their prisoner.

He had not moved from the spot where they had ground his face and shoulders into the pits and pebbles of the road. From somewhere to his right, beyond a planted field, came shouted obscenities, ending “… promised the Chief of Police not to kill you … that’s the hell of it.” He heard it clearly though his head rang and buzzed within its protecting layer of bone. He put his hand up to his face, feeling it wet, but the light was too dim to let him see whether the wet was his blood or some of their tar. He did not care just then. He started for the car he had borrowed from Jonathan Smithers of the League, by luck a Reo like his own, but a new one. He had been foresighted enough to leave it under a tree a hundred yards away.

He walked with a blurry unsureness and wondered how much time had passed since their assault. His right foot kicked into a piece of white cloth; as he stooped to pick it up, pain tore through the base of his skull. He wondered if they had injured his neck or given him a concussion, but his attention was not fully engaged by the possibility, as if he did not care about that either.

The white cloth was Reitman’s torn and bloodied shirt, and he rolled it into a packet, clenching his fist about it as if it was suddenly dear to him. He moved on again, thinking, I mustn’t lose it, I’ll need it.

“I’ll need it,” was what he had said to Smithers at the lecture hall. “I’ll probably need it.”

The beginnings of this vile night suddenly were clear again. He and Smithers were at the hall because Emma Goldman was to speak on—of all things—Henrik Ibsen’s
An Enemy of the People,
and they had reason to expect furor or worse. Vigilantes had crowded the San Diego railroad station hours before, when she arrived from Los Angeles with her manager, Dr. Ben Reitman, and by the time the two were in an autobus for the Ulysses S. Grant Hotel, a typical storm of jeers and threats had blown up to roaring proportions.

From the hotel, word was sent to Smithers by a member of the League. Other vigilantes, some openly armed, were there, jesting with the Chief of Police. The Mayor was on his way, and in the street, crowds were already gathering.

“You stay here,” Paige had said to Smithers. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

Smithers insisted that Evan borrow his car. “I suppose I’d better, Jonathan. If there’s trouble, I’ll probably need it.”

Their four cars were pulling away from the hotel as he drove up. He didn’t know they had Reitman tied and covered over, on the floor of the first one. He saw their flags, heard their curses and shouts, and inside the hotel, he saw the police clearing the way for the last of the vigilantes. His decision to follow the fourth car was automatic, as if the steering wheel in his hands had turned by itself.

That’s how it had been—each detail stood out as the buzz and noise in his ears and head died down. He ran the last yards to the tree and the car.

Smithers’ car was still there. But its four doors were hanging crazily from their hinges and its tires were slashed deep and wide in gashes that showed the metal of the rims beneath.

How had they been so sure the car was his? They had stopped their procession to take this vengeance but he had heard nothing, no twisting of steel as they wrenched the doors in their vandal hands, no hissing of air from slaughtered tires. He
had
gone unconscious after all.

He turned from the dangling doors and flapping strips of rubber and sat down on the running board, as exhausted as a drowning swimmer. This dirt road must be twenty miles from the city; he remembered passing a painted sign, “County Line,” while he was trailing their cars, and they had not begun to slow down until they had left the sign well behind.

He tried to empty his mind of image and memory, to stop speculating about how he could get back to his hotel. First, he needed to rest, to regain himself.

Hardly a moment passed before he was up again, searching for further damage to the car. He could find none. Four new tires, four new doors—their vengeance had come in specific terms and tidy quantities. Had they been inspired further, they might also have bent and pierced and scratched each fender, all the shining glass and metal, gouged out the faceted lenses from the brass headlamps, smashed the engine itself.

The cloth packet was hurting his hand. He loosened his grip; he had been jamming two buttons against the bones of his fingers. As if the buttons tapped out a coded order, Evan instantly retraced his steps to the open space where they had ringed Reitman, and began to search the ground, inch by inch.

The last of the blur was gone from his vision and in the light of the high stars and the bright crescent of the moon, he found a long scrap of dark wool that might have come from a man’s trousers, and he pocketed it. He saw a gleaming section of curved glass, and knew it would fit the face of a dollar watch. He found, innocently clustered in a clump on the road, some small-scaled cactus, “them little needly acorny ones.”

He saw what might have been the newspaper spreader, but he was wrenched by the spasm of vomit again and decided that Exhibits A, B, and C would be evidence enough for any court of law that
was
a court of law.

He stood still, breathing deeply and quietly, resting once more. The farmhouse was little more than a shack, he saw now, but he moved toward it until he was sure that there was no barn, no stable that could contain a horse and wagon.

Then he began to walk toward San Diego.

The doctor sent by Jonathan Smithers said, “Nothing broken, and I think no concussion.” But he refused to let him get up, no matter how urgently Evan said he had to go to the League office, finish his report and turn over his exhibits.

“Apart from the manhandling, Mr. Paige,” he said diffidently, “there’s your walking most of the night before the milk wagon showed up. Twelve miles for anybody out of training—well, you see. I’ll give you something for pain.”

Dr. Grimes handed Evan a domed pill, poured water from the white crockery pitcher on the bedside table, and said, “You take this pill, and I’ll look in on you after supper.”

Evan nodded, thinking, I’ll be back in an hour. He swallowed the pill with the complacent knowledge that he was going to disobey, the moment the doctor’s back was turned. As long as the hurricanes of pain blowing through his neck and legs meant no internal damage to brain or body, he had to see Jonathan and the others at once, to fill out the rough account he had telephoned the moment he had reached the hotel. They were already tracking down Ernie and Herbie and Bobbo, but he could give them descriptions, details, clues that might make it easier, faster and surer.

“In case you have any lawyer’s plan worked out about getting up anyway,” Dr. Grimes added conversationally from the doorway, “you’ll be giving it up in about two minutes. The pill I gave you was a real persuader.”

He nodded pleasantly and left. Evan wondered if he could have prevented Grimes from out-maneuvering him so handily, and decided he could not. The few seconds that had slipped by had taken some of his urgency along with them. His eyelids seemed thicker already and he leaned back into the pillows’ support with gratitude.

At his side he could see Alida’s letter, a flash of white on the table, and he reached out, to read it again. But his hand fell an inch short of it, and he let it rest there, soothed at its proximity. She had written ten days ago but the letter had reached him only yesterday. Parts of it were funny, especially about her secret fear of joining the great parade up Fifth Avenue from the Arch up to Madison Square.

“Alexandra was nervous too, but she kept my courage up,” she wrote, “telling me ten times over that once I marched in public for something like Woman Suffrage, I’d like it so much, I’d do it every chance I got.”

Evan smiled. Sleep was all about him now, slowing his breathing and adding weight to his head, but he made another effort to pick up Alida’s letter, and this time he succeeded. The last page had saddened him, about Garry and Letty and their weekend in Barnett. He turned to it again.

“They worry me so,” Alida had written at the top of the sheet. She had crossed the words out, and crossed them out a second and third time, but the paper had taken her pen’s first pressure to its heart, and still revealed the curves and lines of every word she had tried so insistently to unsay.

“Last night we were talking about the
Titanic
again, and I said how unbearable if a warship or submarine had done it
on purpose,
instead of a submerged iceberg in a horrifying accident. Garry didn’t do anything except agree—in an instant, an iceberg of our own was right there in the room! I have the heaviest feeling that Letty freezes up about all sorts of things now, and if I say a word about the news or politics, I get that faint embarrassed sense that they’ve just had a quarrel but want me not to guess that they did. If this happened only once, I’d decide they
did
have a whopper, and think nothing of it. But it’s a persistent impression, and I pray I’m just imagining things.”

Evan bowed his head, as if to second her prayer. Immediate pain ringed his throat, sending waving tendrils up into his brain, and he wondered if Grimes could have overlooked some hidden injury that his own doctor at home would have detected. He put Alida’s letter down on the bed beside him and fell asleep.

Voices and lights struck at him from everywhere, and he opened his eyes unwillingly. Jonathan was coming in, closing the door behind him quickly. Beyond him in the hall were several policemen.

Jonathan came close, asking how he felt, was the pain less? Beyond him, Evan saw bright light at the two windows, despite their lowered blinds; his disappointment was like a child’s anger. It was still daylight; Dr. Grimes and a second pill were a long way off.

“What time is it?”

“Ten, Evan. It’s morning.”

“Grimes said he’d come back after supper.”

“He did come back. You were still under and had fever. Grimes gave you a stronger sedative. I was here with him, so I know.”

Evan tried to see his watch. It had been moved from the table, together with the thick white pitcher and Alida’s letter. Two small bottles stood there now, nothing else.

With a start he said, “Who took my things away? Is my coat here?”

“I took your exhibits with me last night; they’re in the office safe, locked up.” He pointed to a sheet of paper tacked to the closet door. “I left you a signed receipt in case you woke up and thought you’d been robbed.”

“Good man.” He glanced toward the hall door, alert in a flash.

“I thought of the police, too,” Jonathan said. “Especially since the Citizens’ Committee will affirm on oath that they know no Bobbo, no Herbie, no Ernie, and that all their members were in their trundle beds right through the entire night.”

Evan didn’t answer. The Citizens’ Committee. How innocent, how upright.

“I’ll get up,” he said slowly. “I suppose the police out there are armed with a fine warrant, to arrest
me
for disturbing the peace?”

“Not by all the warrants in this sovereign state. You’ve got a lawyer, sir, who’s qualified to practice before the California Bar, as you are NOT. You also have a physician who has attested in writing that you are to remain in this room until he says different.”

“That’s good too.” He got to his feet, and moved his head in a tentative circle, and then slowly backward. “I’m all right,” he said.

“Coffee is coming up in a minute,” Smithers said. “And some eggs.”

“I’m all right now,” Evan repeated. “I’d better be, with what’s ahead.”

He didn’t mean for that one day, he thought as he shaved. He didn’t mean only in San Diego, or even Los Angeles where the new League chapter had just formed. He meant in the Governor’s mansion at San Francisco, he meant in Washington, D. C, he meant in New York, he meant in courtrooms and in judge’s chambers and wherever he would be spending all the hours he meant to spend on this fight until he could again come to some possible pause.

June was half over before Evan Paige was at home again. His homecoming dinner was at Garry and Letty’s apartment, but afterwards, on that same evening, he and Alida went down to the Lower East Side to meet the Ivarins at the all-night café they had so often heard about.

Evan himself had arranged the midnight meeting. As he and Alida were leaving for the city in the late afternoon, he had telephoned Stefan, and almost his first words were, “Do you remember what you said that time—‘if there is a free-speech case you are angry about’?”

“Yes, certainly, yes.” Ivarin was obscurely pleased that Paige had remembered and meant to hold him to it. “What is a convenient time to talk about it?”

“We’re starting for Garry’s house now,” Evan said. “You’ll be at the paper tonight, won’t you?”

“Did you say ‘the paper’?”

“I wondered if you might manage half an hour later on in the evening,
this
evening. Then Alida and I could go downtown when we leave Garry’s, and perhaps see you at your office.”

“Excellent! But wait—”

Stefan was charmed at the unexpected suggestion. He had guessed Evan would be returning in a fury from California; there had been some Sunday pieces in
The Call
about the free-speech riots there. But it had not occurred to him that Evan would be driven to act the first night he was at home. That was more like his own character than like the equable and controlled New Englander Paige invariably seemed to be.