Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

Eddgar was expelled the next day, April 30. More than three-quarters of the faculty voted in favor. Jeering members of One Hundred Flowers were dragged off by Damon's finest as they stood with placards, heckling the president of the university when he returned home from the meeting. Eddgar addressed the cameras of virtually every California television station. Freedom of speech and thought, he said – the supposed cardinal values of university life – had been exposed, he said, as a fiction, a sham, a quilted coverlet masking the iron face of political rigor and reactionary values.

In spite of the high drama, Eddgar's story did not remain at the top of the news. By 11 p.m., when Michael and I took our places in the bedroom where I'd moved the TV set in deference to Nile's sleep, the lead item was Richard Nixon's address to the nation earlier in the evening. I had read that the speech was coming, but like everyone else never anticipated the content. Now Nixon announced he was sending U S soldiers into the Cambodian Fish Hook to rout out North Vietnamese supplies and troops, and also bombing their supply routes in Laos. The screen filled with Nixon's shadowy, humorless mug as the President, in one of his Orwellian fabrications, assured the nation that the war was not expanding.

'Can you believe this?' I asked Michael, who replied with a limp shrug. The newsreader ran on to other matters – Eddgar's expulsion; the news that the judge at the Kopechne inquest had questioned Edward Kennedy's veracity; suspicion that Juanita Rice and her captors had robbed another bank in West LA. Michael eventually slipped out, saying he was sleepy, while I continued fulminating. After all Nixon's talk about how the war was winding down, he was invading another nation. After all the protests, the marches, the mobilized dissent – after all my pain -Nixon was still in the spell of the generals and his ingrained paranoia. He was refusing to bow to the Commies as always, struggling to win a war he could only lose, killing young men for the ego and profit of old ones, and proving, as if he meant to, the correctness of those who had contended all along that only far more dramatic measures would breed change.

Within the hour, I heard voices blaring behind the apartment. Out on Campus Boul, protesters had commandeered the microphone at a drive-thru fast-food restaurant and were exclaiming, in the amplified voice, "Dick Nixon! Dick Nixon!' Another group was in the middle of the street, bringing traffic to a skidding halt and chorusing back something similar about Spiro Agnew. I hung through the open window. At top volume, I screamed right along – Dick Nixon – yelling until Nile woke and my throat felt so raw I imagined it might be bloody.

*

With the news the following morning, I came to believe that I'd been briefly wrested from sleep by the boom of what I took for a storm. That remains my memory – a single vague concussive pock bouncing off the clouds. I'm still not certain.

I was in the shower just after 5:00, when I heard footsteps thundering up the stairs – a determined pounding, oblivious of the hour. There was a single phenomenal bang overhead, which seemed to shake the building, and then, I was sure, shouting. I opened the front door of the apartment and saw three Damon coppers on the landing. They were in full battle gear, helmets and shiny boots and bulletproof vests. They had their riot batons drawn. One of them saw me and said, 'Get back inside.' I had only a towel around my waist, but even half-naked I found that my reflexive regard for high authority had fled.

'Go fuck yourself,' I replied. It was a sign of how my sense was failing. He reared back as if he had been struck, lifting his baton from his side.

There were shouts from above, and footfalls again shook the wooden stairwell so hard I could feel them. With his arms cuffed from behind, Eddgar was pushed down the steps with a cop at each side.

'What the hell?' I asked.

I thought Eddgar smiled as he went by. His dark hair was tousled and he wore pants but no shoes and socks. The three cops, including the one who was prepared to hit me, took off to clear the way. They wrestled Eddgar down the stairs and threw him in the back of a squad car parked below whose noisy radio voice I'd heard but hadn't really noted. When I looked up, June stood a few feet in front of her threshold in her long white night shift, clutching Nile, who wore solely his large diaper. Only now he began to cry. Behind them, I could see the door of the apartment, smashed off the hinges and split; fresh wood was revealed in the rent, as with a lightning-struck tree.

'What in God's name?' I brought them into my apartment. June was shaking. I dressed Nile and laid him down on my sofa. The diaper, of course, was soaked. I spent a great deal of time soothing him, and June soon joined me. Apparently, he had not seen most of it, but Nile was awake as his father had been cuffed and hustled out. June and I kept assuring him that Eddgar was all right. Finally, he accepted our advice and with little warning went back to sleep. June and I sat in the kitchen, drinking tea and whispering. 'They just broke in?'

'They said they had an arrest warrant. I never saw it.' She lit a cigarette. In an act of hapless modesty, she had thrown an old green knitted shawl over herself before leaving her apartment. She sat in my kitchen in her cotton nightdress, clutching her bare arms.

'For what? What are they busting him for?'

She pondered her cigarette. 'The bomb,' she said. 'Last night. About 1:oo in the morning actually – the ARC was bombed. The whole west wing of the building was destroyed. Most of the labs over there.' She described the explosion scene, dust and bricks blown a quarter of a mile.

I asked about injuries.

'The building was -' she said and stopped. 'You'd think the building would be empty. They're saying -' June faltered again. 'Someone was in his lab late. One of the profs. He's hospitalized. They claim he lost his hand, an arm.'

'Oh God. And they arrested Eddgar for it?'

'This is what it's going to be like. Now. I keep telling him that. This is what the faculty did. This is what they've intended. They've stripped away the last vestiges – the last protective plumage of class membership. This is going to happen again and again. Any occasion. Any excuse. It doesn't matter how careful we are. You understand that, don't you?' She leaned toward me with rare directness and grasped my hand. Over time, my relationship with June had acquired a subtle confidential air, beginning, I guess, the day I saw her in all her glory on Michael's threshold. On nights she was home before Eddgar, she poured herself two fingers of bourbon, an indulgence she occasionally allowed herself, particularly outside his presence, and talked to me about her household. With the tumbler in hand, she could emit a languorous air, taking all her weight on her heels, an elbow laid on the kitchen countertop. Sometimes she worried out loud about Nile – his social adjustment, his reading. Occasionally there were candid remarks about Eddgar, issued as her eye rose to meet mine above her glass, which I knew I was expected to maintain in strictest privacy. For me, she was a bit of a confidante, as well. I told her about my parents and of course, as I did with everyone else I knew, poured out my anguish to her about my breakup with Sonny. But she spoke to me now as I imagined she talked to someone else, someone who knew her far better than I did.

'We have to get out of here,' June said, 'I keep telling him that. He won't listen, he doesn't care, he thinks he's prepared for what's coming. He wants it to happen to him. He still believes that suffering is good for the soul. He's still wound up in so many crazy ideas. I keep telling him to think about Nile. And he keeps asking me if I don't love the revolution, repeating that a child can't be harmed by the truth.' She stubbed out the cigarette emphatically. She massaged her neck and wondered aloud if she should have a drink to collect herself, and then concluded that it would be better not to get started, the day would be difficult enough.