Vida (22 page)

“Daniel, I don’t plan to brawl. It’s as much my duty to demonstrate as it is yours!”

“Your duty is to your unborn child! You’re staying.”

“They don’t ask Vietnamese women if they’re pregnant before they drop napalm on them!” Natalie yelled. “What kind of fink do you suppose I am to sit home while everybody’s putting their bodies on the line? Do you think I have some kind of pass out of having to take chances, just because I’m a mother?”

“Natalie, I came down to ask you if you can man the telephones with Larkin. It’s awfully important tonight,” Vida said, trying to make peace in her family. Besides, Lark deserved to meet Natalie for voting on her side. Maybe Natalie would for once fall in love with somebody else, just once! Lark was much nicer than Daniel; maybe he’d like a ready-made family. She had already passed on a few titillating details to Lohania on the scene between them. Lohania had been intrigued, for Lark’s maiming did not put her off. “Could you get to the SAW office fast? Just take Sam along. We need people to handle the media and arrange bail.”

“You’re just trying to make me feel as if I’m still a political person,” Natalie said, close to tears. “When I’m eight months gone I’ll sit in the I stupid office. But at this stage my baby’s protected against earthquake and even a couple of casual pokes in the belly!” Natalie was sent off to the SAW office. Lohania was annoyed. “Why didn’t you back her up? She has a right to be with us.” Lohania marched out alone, to try to penetrate the Hilton.

Daniel, Pelican and his roommates and Vida set off together. “She’s so little,” Vida said to herself about Natalie. Her sister seemed to her less able to run through the streets. For once she sympathized with patriarchal Daniel. As they emerged from the subway among the many passersby on the evening midtown pavement, they recognized knots of their own kind. The placards were being hoisted; the chants were beginning. Suddenly more and more of them began to come together. A group from Teachers for Peace was singing “We Shall Overcome.” Her chest burned with excitement. Yes, look! Yes. Everywhere her people came together, marching arm in arm linked and shouting. The demonstration was starting. It was truly happening. Some words on a page she had written and people responded.

The legal segment of the demonstration, where protesters walked with signs to and fro in a corridor between police lines, was two blocks away. Here demonstrators were stopping the cars of dignitaries, the limousines, the chauffeur-driven Cadillacs and Chryslers. Into the path of the cars they darted screaming. Bland faces peered at them through thick glass as if they were the menace, they who had never ordered a death; who controlled no bombs, no death rays, no machines of mass terror, no chemicals that brought starvation and changed the genes forever; they who wore no diamonds mined by black captive labor in the bowels of South Africa and invested in no Afrikaans enterprises burbling stolen profits. A kid was dragged half a block on a car that would not slow down and was helped off by a medic, leg crooked, nose bleeding.

“No, guys! Not the regular cars!” she was yelling. “The limousines. Stick to the limousines!” You had to keep reminding the troops what they were supposed to be attacking. Too much Halloween. They could get intoxicated by the crazy raggedy feeling of running in the streets whooping. “Only the richies! Let the regular cars through.” Had they even bothered to read the pamphlet? How could you do political education when people can’t read any longer? Maybe that was the purpose of the slow destruction in the schools. The media were under tight control, while anybody with a printing press in their garage could produce the written word. The new illiteracy imposed by the schools. She wrote a leaflet in her head, running at full tilt to keep track of the action. “Only the richies! Only the limousines!” Corporate lawyers who specialized in military contractors, the folks who had founded the CIA and invented the missile gap, sugar magnates fresh from engineering an invasion of the Dominican Republic, officers from the Export-Import Bank, the Foreign Bond Holders Protector Council, Mobil Oil, Con Edison, IBM, the Dallas Citizens Council, Chase Manhattan Bank, ALCOA, IT&T, Pan American,
The New York Times, Time-Life
—they were in those cars. She knew their dossiers, compiled painstakingly in libraries by Movement researchers, but she could not tell one face from another.

Barbarians, a professor at Columbia had called the Movement in the
Times
that morning. Maybe the barbarians, the savages were always those who had less lethal weapons. Bows and arrows versus tanks and artillery. Their own lithe bodies dancing in front of tons of metal. That made them savages: lacking the metal. Lacking armor, lacking armies, lacking the underlings to do it for you.

Although the night was crisp, Vida felt hot under the wool shirt, running. She strained, leaping over occasional stoops, knocked-down garbage cans, running hard because a mounted cop was galloping after her trying to run her down. She stayed out from under the horse’s hooves by keeping close to the building, but then he leaned out of the saddle swinging his nightstick and brought her down. Police sirens whooped hysterically in the next street to the left as she twisted and dodged away from the blows of his club, plunging into a group of people in evening clothes emerging from a bar. A woman screamed at the rearing horse. Was her arm broken? She tried to move it as she ran. She jumped across the open stairway that led down and then plunged between two buildings, into a narrow passageway where the horse could not follow. The cop galloped after other prey. She fell panting against a building. Her arm throbbed. Was it broken? She felt cautiously, then moved it. Ow—her muscle felt torn; but the bone was intact.

Chanting in the next street. “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” As her breath slowed, she stumbled to her feet and turned toward the troops. Time to regroup, time to storm the hotel again. Turn them back from random charging down random streets. Back to square one. She had not liked being chased by the cop on horseback. Why were they always the ones running? Why were they always the ones getting beaten?

Glass breaking. Screaming. She scrambled up a chain-link fence and dropped into a parking lot, crouching after the jolt of landing on the pavement below. Then she trotted out into the street, broken-field running among cars. She caught a glimpse of Kevin slugging it out with a counterdemonstra-tor. No reason to do that. It accomplished nothing politically, although she recognized a certain satisfaction in the sight. The movement had begun in pacifism, and she had twice been beaten by counterdemonstrators when they had caught her alone. They liked to trap Movement women and try to disfigure them, shouting
Whore!
Kevin was less easy prey, but fighting with thugs was not their purpose. They were out in the open to demonstrate, to show the government—and tonight especially the invisible government, the decision makers—how much anger existed against their war.

She ran down the street, hoarsely bellowing, “Back to the Hilton! Back to the Hilton! Come on, let’s get them!” She had a moment of ice-water disassociation as she turned to lead a pack toward the center of the action. All this did not come naturally, not naturally at all. It felt weird. It felt, at the oddest moments, sharply improper. Her inner barricades were as well manned as the police lines she could see ahead. Between those barricades the mass of demonstrators marched chanting, waving placards. Things were orderly here. The crowd shuffled in the narrow corridor permitted them, a block from the hotel where the Association was meeting, while the cops lined up taunting them, swinging their clubs, thwack, thwack, in their hands. They passed comments on the women, laughing.

We brought all these people here, she thought, but felt afraid, of them, for them, with them. The press mostly stood across the street and looked at them as if visiting a zoo. Photographers from the papers snapped pictures, as did those who worked for the Red Squad. There was the video truck they called WFBI. This was the legal demonstration site. Of course, most of the action was happening on the far side of the hotel where she had been stopping cars with groups of SAW irregulars and where occasional cat’s-paws of troops tried guerrilla assaults on the hotel, aimed at any disruption they could produce. They did not really expect to get inside, but they hoped to frighten the powerful, to ruffle their security. The guilty shudder sometimes even before children jumping up and down with paint on their faces and scrawled placards in their hands; that is, the ones who aren’t too bored. It was necessary, the pressure they put on, to keep the escalations to a certain size. They had not yet stopped the war, but they had contained it.

Where was Lohania now? Had she penetrated the hotel? Vida had a moment of pure terror while the pain from her shoulder threatened to engulf her. Her side ached. Her feet hurt from so much running on pavement. Somewhere she had cut her hand, probably scaling the fence. It had stopped bleeding, but it too hurt. Against a building a medic was tending a girl whose scalp was freely bleeding down into her eyes over her smashed glasses. He was picking bits of glass out of her face. Oscar, carrying coffee for the marshals, stopped to comfort her. Then he saw Vida and made his way to her.

“Want some coffee?” Oscar asked her, passing a paper cup. He had a rough bandage over his forehead, making him look rakish, a pirate: scholarly Oscar. “They busted Rossi and Marv.”

What did he feel? Did he feel responsibility bearing down on him? Was he scared? You called them and they came and that made you responsible for every injury, every accident, every maiming. No, they had choices. They were angry. They needed to fight back. She did not know what she felt except that to stop and reflect made her buckle with fatigue. “They’re busting a lot tonight,” she said. “Do we know what precinct, Oz?” She used the name she had called him when they were lovers, but he did not notice.

“All over, to make it harder” He stepped closer. “Good idea to send Natalie down to cover the phones. It released Lark.”

Oh, dear, that couldn’t be good for him. “I thought we could use two people down there.”

“Know where he is?” Oscar stepped close enough to speak in her ear. “Inside.”

“With Lohania?” She looked at the hotel, asking with her eyes.

“She went in first. Rossi got busted trying. Then Lark volunteered”

“It’s dangerous,” she said helplessly.

“Jan was going to go in, but she chickened out,” he said bluntly about his lover.

“I’m heading back out. Diversion, anyhow.”

“This gives us practice in mobile street tactics,” Oscar said with deadly seriousness as a flying wedge of police came at the line of demonstrators from across the street. “Here they come. Hold that line! Hold that line!”

She dropped the coffee, battered against the wall before she could budge. Then she began struggling out of the melee. Stooping to gather a fallen placard—N
O
M
ORE
B
OMBING/CALL THE
T
ROOPS
H
OME
—she dodged out of the trap and, shouting hoarsely, led a countercharge across the street blocked with police lines. They could shoot, she thought, charging the line. Someday they will. But the police had not been prepared for their sudden attack, and they rammed through on surprise into the street in front of the hotel. She felt like laughing; she was grinning as she ran with her comrades. Charged right through, how do you like that? She wished she could see herself on film. She loved herself; she loved all of them. She saw Kevin running just to her right, fending off assaults by sheer force. He was a good man in street action, she had to admit. She wondered if he knew Lohania was trying to plant a stink bomb inside; would she have told him? She leaped another barricade, astonishing herself. Her best moments were when she did not stop to think in a demonstration but seized an opening. The mass of demonstrators, attacked on the right flank of the police, surged after the first batch. Soon there was fighting in the whole block.

A motion on her right. She turned to see the truncheon coming down on her, saw it suspended in a moment of terror as her arm started to rise to protect her head and the arm could not rise—she could not use that arm with the shoulder injury—and then Kevin launched himself between. He hit the cop full force in the elbow and the truncheon went flying. Then they were beyond.

“Thank you,” she said as they ran on side by side. She turned her head to smile at him apologetically.

“Don’t mention it” He was grinning out of his shaggy blond beard. “What’s with your arm?”

“It took the brunt earlier. Cop on horseback.”

“They can’t get horses in here.” He surveyed the street almost leisurely. “Good brawl” She realized he was enjoying himself, and she did not know whether she was impressed or appalled. Then she saw Daniel go down under three police swinging clubs and disappear from sight. As she struggled toward him, she saw him finally dragged free and thrown into a paddy wagon. He did not land with a thump because they threw him on top of the pile of people already loaded; and then they locked the doors.

A while later she looked at her watch and realized that it was ten and the crowds were beginning to thin out. Arrests, casualties, fatigue. “Break it up” she began passing the word. “Time to move out” Those lingering would be busted for sure. She could find only Pelican and his roommate Fred. They stripped the obvious signs of battle from themselves so they wouldn’t be picked off as they entered the subway, and then wearily, without conversation, rode home. Automatically Pelican and Fred followed her into her apartment, one of the nerve centers. Leigh was waiting, a bottle of Sangre de Toro open on the table.