Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

Sonny tirelessly consoled Zora. She sent her money whenever she could afford to and also maintained communications with

Zora's enormous Polish family – the Milkowskis – with whom Zora, generally, was not on speaking terms. I took Zora with her wild look, erratic manner, and self-centered habits as clearly out of her mind. But this, I quickly learned, was not a view I was free to share.

Late one night the meeting of one of Eddgar's collectives ended upstairs, while Sonny and I were in the rack, stoned and amorous. In order to confound the Damon police surveillance, the rads would head out from Eddgar's in all directions, and three or four of them came clomping down the back stairs in their work boots, passing right next to our open window. We ceased grinding, waiting for the loud voices to drift off into the thin night. One of the last remarks I heard was someone trying to be brassy, boasting about the oinkers he was going to off on the day the rev came. Drifting on the dope, I found myself pondering the question that life in Eddgar's midst was gradually forcing on me.

'Do you think there's going to be a revolution?' I asked. ‘I mean, really?'

Beneath me, Sonny groaned. 'Of course not.'

'Oh.'

'Seth, I mean – baby, I grew up with this. It's a crazy discussion. If there was no revolution in the United States in the 1930s, when 15 percent of the workforce was unemployed, how could it ever happen now?'

I repeated, somewhat experimentally, what I'd heard Eddgar say about raising the consciousness of the working class. 'These guys on the assembly lines who think they love George Wallace? They're like avoiding the despair of their own lives.'

'Seth, these are the people my mother has been organizing all her life. I've listened to Zora explain to them that they don't recognize their despair, and they've run her out of town.'

'That's Zora.'

Beneath me, Sonny slid her hips back so that I was suddenly on my own. 'What does that mean?'

I knew I was on tender ground, but somehow I felt provoked, probably by her callousness toward my own screwy hopes.

'It means, you know, no offense, but your mother can come across as a little weird.'

'Meaning?'

' "Meaning?" Jesus, don't be dense, goddamn it. I mean, maybe all these working joes are like rejecting Zora, not what she's saying.'

The light went on then, a painful brightness. Sonny, whose warmth seldom left her, was cold as stone. 'Not my mother,' she said. I shielded my eyes. 'Okay.' 'Never.' 'I get it.'

She flipped the light off and turned her back on me. 'Sonny.'

She shirked my hand.

Eventually I slept, but about an hour along I woke. Some sense, perhaps just waiting for my bearings, told me not to move too quickly. Gradually I became aware of Sonny beside me, breathing heavily, jolting with small tremors. After a number of minutes, I realized that her hands were beneath her waist, finishing off what I'd begun. I lay there in the dark, absolutely still, not knowing what to do, whether it would be too humiliating if I intervened -or if, as I suspected, that was not even desired. Instead, I listened, as her breath slowly rose, reaching its summit and briefly ceasing as she thrilled to her own touch, and then resuming softly as she disappeared into sleep.

Hobie's newfound alliance with Cleveland Marsh, which had uncharacteristically brought both of them to the ARC demonstration, had begun one night in the fall when Hobie was at our apartment for dinner. Heading up the stairs to a meeting at the Eddgars', Cleveland had caught sight of Hobie in our doorway, where he was lurking as usual in hopes of passing a word with his illustrious classmate. In his black turtleneck and shades, Cleveland drifted past, then thought better of something and, a few steps above, extended a finger Hobie's way. A.45-caliber cartridge, sleekly jacketed in copper, swung like an amulet around his neck.

'Hey, Blood,' he said. 'We got a kind of study thing we might be doin’ in Contracts. You know? Maybe you be up for that?'

Personally, I was somewhat unsettled by my passing contacts with Cleveland. Not because he was manifestly angry. Leaving aside Hobie, every young black person I knew seemed perpetually pissed off, an attitude which required little explanation in 1969, a year after Martin Luther King had been gunned down, and one in every eight Americans had voted for George Wallace for President. But I'd grown up around black folks; I'd marched, I'd held hands; I'd dated black girls. I knew the churches and the preaching; the dance steps; the hierarchies of the black middle class. I knew what was different and what wasn't. Cleveland was the first black person I'd encountered who unrepentantly refused to look beyond the color of my skin. He viewed me with the sinister, unfeeling look you'd save for a snake.

Nonetheless, Hobie was thrilled by Cleveland's comradeship. Cleveland had grown up in Marin City, the housing project at the foot of the Golden Gate, and had become an all-West Coast Conference running back for Damon. In the spring of 1968, he had made the national news shows repeatedly, first when he announced that he had joined the Panthers, and then when he was admitted to Damon Law School amid protests from faculty and alumni, who objected either to his political views or to his qualifications. Hobie regarded anyone who'd been on television as if they descended from a higher realm. In this, I suppose, he took after his father, Gurney, who had a treasured row of celebrity photos above his soda fountain, featuring baseball stars, jazz musicians, and boxers. Besides, Hobie's relationship with Cleveland soon took on a predictable dimension. Shortly after the ARC demonstration, Hobie arrived for Doobie Hour with a small bundle which he opened as soon as Michael was gone for the night.

'Called co-caine,' he told Sonny and me, as he spilled a small white rock out of a test tube onto a pocket mirror. Sonny was always too earnest to really enjoy drugs of any kind. She described the near-ruination of Sigmund Freud's medical career when he'd unwittingly addicted patients to this miracle substance, and left the room in disgust. But with Hobie my watchword was to try anything once. Overall, I wasn't impressed.

'It's groovy,' said Lucy. 'Except the straw. Everybody's nose? That's gross.'

'Where do you come into this stuff?' I asked Hobie.

'Panthers are into some awesome shit,' he said, as he was sniffling and wheeling his head about to absorb the rush. 'This here, man, this is a far-out form of political fund-raising. They've got a dude, man, he's stamping out acid in tabs with the big B on them? Wrapped in the little bubbles of cellophane? Aspirin all the way, when you look at it. Outta-sight operation.'

'Hobie even went to Cleveland's house,' said Lucy. 'He's got like kids. It was all weird and everything. Did you tell Seth? There are all these guns? And -'

With his huge hand, Hobie had taken hold of her knee. His eyes flashed at me somewhat tentatively.

'That whole scene, they're freaky paranoid, you know. "Safe houses." All that shit. Fucking I Spy, or something. You know the rap: I'm righteous and I'm a brother, but anybody else, nothin bout nothin. I had to swear by the Zulu gods.' He smiled at himself. It took me a second to understand he was saying he wasn't going to talk about it. Hobie and I generally had no secrets, particularly when it came to his exploits. But Cleveland remained a touchy subject.

Late one afternoon, shortly after the turn of the year, Hobie rang the bell and stood downstairs in his green army-surplus poncho. The rains had come then, occasional chill downpours, but more often drizzle and heavy fog, nasty stuff that felt like a cold hand gripping my bones. The blue flame in the space heater in our hall was never off.

'Okay you drive?' Hobie yelled up. We were going to play basketball on campus. As we were walking among the puddles toward my car, I glimpsed Hobie's old Dodge Dart, springshot and rustworn, off in a corner of the gravel lot. The car had the old push-button automatic and half a psychedelic paint job, both front fenders whorled in color. I asked what was wrong with it.