Mean Streak (31 page)

I stared at the button until the sun made little black spots in front of my eyes.

Stop the plane—I'm getting off!

The thought started drumming at me as we taxied along the La Guardia runway. The man in the seat ahead of mine reclined his chair as far back as it would go, in direct violation of the overhead sign, thrusting himself into my already tight space. Hell is other people, especially on airplanes.

Finally we were next in line to take off. The engines roared, the wheels accelerated, and we took the great broadjump into the sky.
Stop the plane … stop the plane … STOP THE PLANE
became a painful pounding in my inner ear.

I was never afraid to fly. Afraid to get to my destination, yes; this was not a new feeling. But flight itself was freeing. “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth.” The trouble was, you had to land; the surly bonds of earth won every time.

Over the engine's roar I heard Ron's voice from the summer of '69: “Just how poisonous is this stuff, anyway?”

“A little dab'll do ya,” Joel Rapaport had replied with his usual flipness.

A little dab was all it took to turn Kenny Gebhardt, Jan's cousin, from live nuisance to dead meat. The fact that he'd chosen to inhale the stuff didn't help much.

“Would you like coffee or tea, ma'am?” The real-life voice of the flight attendant brought me back to reality. I wondered just when I'd stopped answering to “miss” and edged over into “ma'am.” Within seconds of ordering, a toylike bottle of vodka appeared on my tray along with a thimbleful of spiced tomato juice. I brushed away thoughts that drinking on an airplane before a court appearance wasn't a good idea; if the ghost of Kenny Gebhardt was going to occupy the seat next to me, I'd need a little spiritual sustenance.

Even tomato juice brought back memories. The last drink of the night at the old Rivoli Bar in Toledo: beer spiked with tomato juice, Wes Tannock's surefire home preventative for hangovers. Not only was it totally ineffective; it looked and tasted like you'd bled into your brew. I drank it anyway; I could have—and did—swallow anything John Wesley Tannock gave me that summer.

The story of that summer for me: I wanted Wes Tannock; I got Ted Havlicek.

We were somewhere over the great green state of Pennsylvania and I was getting as high as the plane. Pot was fine, but I was old enough that alcohol was my first drug of choice.

I gazed out the window at the tree-clustered mountains. From here, they looked like mounds of curly endive. There was something soothing about the gentle undulations of green; the throbbing in my head subsided a little as I leaned back and took in the scenery.

Wes Tannock's voice wasn't famous yet, but it already had the power and authority, the sincerity, that would put him on the political map. I saw him standing on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe church, the setting sun behind him, his shirt drenched with sweat, his throat as raw as Janis Joplin's.

“What do we want?” he shouted into the mike Rap had wired to huge amplifiers.

“JUSTICE,” we all roared.

“When do we want it?”

The response was thunder: “NOW!”

“How will we get it?”

This time the crowd went really wild, jumping and clapping and banging tambourines and garbage can lids.
“HUEL-GA! HUEL-GA!”
We shouted it over and over again until it became a ritual chant that carried us away on a tidal wave of commitment. The strike had begun. Tomorrow's sun would rise on fields empty of the imported workers who picked the crops and kept the ketchup factory supplied with workers.

In the front of the crowd, her face washed with sweat and tears, her eyes glowing with equal parts passion for social justice and lust for Wes Tannock, stood a naive college freshman named Cassandra Jameson.

I lifted my drink; the hand that poured the rest of the vodka into the glass shook a little.

The lady next to me edged over in her seat.

Jan's voice from that long-ago summer was next. She was sobbing as she told us how four-year-old Belita Navarro had been rushed to the hospital, poisoned by the pesticides in the field the family had been working in. “God,” Jan wailed, pounding her hip with a small, clenched fist, “we have to do something.”

Dana Sobel's voice chimed in, thick with anticipation, “This will get their attention. All we have to do is handle it right.”

Tarky, who'd grown up to be Wes Tannock's perennial campaign manager, had handled it. He'd handled it so well we all got arrested, and Ron lost the most precious thing in his life: his conscientious objector status. Because of that summer, he was drafted. Because of that summer, he went to Vietnam. Because of that summer, he came home in a wheelchair.

Oh, who the hell was I kidding? Not because of that summer. Because of me. Because big brother Ron wasn't about to let little sister Cassie play radical activist by herself. He said yes, he got involved in the conspiracy, in order to keep an eye on me.

The plane lowered itself to the ground, over checkerboard farmland cut into fields like a quilt. Red barns and white farmhouses stood like Monopoly hotels surrounded by parsley trees. Straight, black, T-square roads, sped upon by matchbox cars and trucks, sliced the countryside.

I wanted to break the window with my fist and crawl out onto the wing. Anything to keep from walking out of this aircraft and into the past. Anything to keep from standing in a courtroom next to my brother. The fear in my stomach was like a lump of cold oatmeal. I started to shake.

Oblivious to the “Fasten Seat Belt” signs, I undid my belt, gestured frantically to the aisle seat passenger to get out of my way, and lurched into the aisle. Brushing past the flight attendant, I put hand to mouth in a universal gesture of need, and fled to the bathroom, where two Bloody Marys hit the toilet just in time.

As I stood in the tiny metal closet, leaning against the cold glass, sweat pouring down my face, one more voice hit my ear. Like Dylan, Ted Havlicek was talking about more than the weather when he said, “Tornado's coming. Feel the electricity in the air. Like stored-up lightning ready to strike.”

I took a deep breath, but the sense of heavy, electricity-laden air, promising severe storms ahead, didn't dissipate.

It was not for nothing that I was named Cassandra.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

August 20, 1969

The night is hot and muggy, as only a summer night in Toledo can be. The air is a damp wool blanket, heavy and oppressive. Even the fireflies seem to glide lethargically through the darkness, hanging in the air like Japanese lanterns. On the sweeping front porch of the rambling Victorian known as the White House sit eight college students in varying poses of torpid relaxation. A half gallon of peach ice cream with one spoon passes among them, as does a joint whose tiny orange light moves as slowly as the fireflies in the night gloom. From a small transistor radio poised on the porch railing the sounds of “Sleepwalk” fill the night.

Joel Rapaport, known as Rap, sprawls across the creaky porch glider, his seductive salesman's smile at odds with his tie-dyed shirt and hippie headband. His arm reaches across the shoulder of his girlfriend, Dana Sobel. Dana's arms are crossed over her Grateful Dead T-shirt, her straight dark hair and eyebrows as uncompromising as her principles.

On the floor, her long bare legs crossed like a child's, sits Cassie Jameson, at nineteen the second-youngest. She looks at Rap and Dana with something close to envy; they are so sure of one another, so clearly a couple.

She sighs and glances at Wes Tannock, who has the porch swing to himself. He wears cutoff jeans and loafers without socks; one foot kicks at the porch to make the swing go back and forth. He is alone tonight; his girlfriend is at a sorority party. But alone doesn't mean available. Wes has never treated Cass as anything but Ron's little sister.

Ron Jameson leans against the porch railing, his long legs extended, poised as if to walk away any minute. His face is shrouded by his Australian bush hat, which he takes off from time to time to use as a fan.

Paul Tarkanian perches on the railing, defying gravity as he balances his bulk along the thin wooden rail. His long black hair and thick beard make Cass think he should be leading a donkey with one hand and holding a gold pan in the other.

On the floor, cross-legged, sit the two cousins, Jan and Kenny Gebhardt. The silly grin on Jan's face tells Cass that the beer in her hand is far from her first, and probably isn't the only substance in her bloodstream. Kenny, the kid, the sixteen-year-old science nerd who tags along with the older students, sits silent as usual.

One member of the group is missing: Ted Havlicek, Cass's almost-boyfriend. She tears her eyes away from the others every so often to glance along Monroe Street in hopes of seeing his pale blue Valiant chugging toward the house.

The students are foot soldiers in the war Lyndon Johnson declared on poverty. They are volunteers at Amigos Unidos Center, a social services agency for migrant farmworkers.

The migrants who work the fields of northwest Ohio come for the most part from South Texas. They are Mexican-Americans, U.S. citizens, who pile their belongings and their kids into cars every spring and drive north to hoe pickles and beets, to pick tomatoes and cherries. They live in whatever ramshackle housing the farmer provides; chicken coops and old trailers and tiny plumbingless cabins dot the countryside behind the big white farmhouses. They work for less than minimum wage, doing backbreaking labor in the fields.

“Is she still in a coma?” Dana demands. She raises her head from its resting place on Rap's shoulder and leans over to catch a glimpse of Jan's face.

Jan nods. The strand of hair she twirls in one finger finds its way into her mouth; she brushes it back with an impatient gesture. “The doctors said she might die.”

Cass Jameson leans back against the pillar, hiding her face from the cruel clarity of the streetlamp on the corner. She's supposed to be filled with righteous anger over the injury inflicted on four-year-old Belita Navarro, but all she feels so far is numb. Somewhere in the vicinity of her stomach, there is a huge, gray blob of fear, and somewhere behind her eyes are tears she doesn't want the others to see. Radicals don't cry. Radicals don't get mad—they get even. Jan and the others want to get even for Belita; Cass just wants to cry.

But then, she's the one who spent the most time with Belita. She's the one whose mornings were spent at the Migrant Ministry day care center, playing with toddlers while their parents and older siblings worked the fields. At first she resented the assignment, sullenly announcing she'd come to Lucas County to organize a union, not to baby-sit. But one afternoon with the children changed her mind. She met six-year-old girls who woke before the rest of the family to get the beans ready for breakfast. She met little boys who would be expected, when the family moved on to Michigan for the cherries, to climb to the top of the trees and shake down the highest fruit. She met children who had never had a teddy bear, never gone swimming or had a picnic with their families.

And she met Belita, whose round, solemn brown face could light up with a tiny-toothed smile. Belita, who called her
mi Casi
and laughed at her pun. Belita, who laughed when her baby brother wet himself, putting her little hand over her mouth and giggling silently. Belita, who loved playing Candy Land, even though she spoke not a word of English. She didn't understand the rules, or even that there were rules, but she loved moving the little pieces along the track to the gumdrop mountains. Cass brought real gumdrops one day, and the child was amazed to find that the colored mountains were pictures of real things you could actually eat.

Now Belita lies in a coma, near death. And all she did was play in a field near her makeshift home. A field that had been sprayed with a deadly pesticide called parathion.

Cass bites down on a lower lip that threatens to tremble into humiliating tears. She tries to tune back in to the discussion, but finds it hard to concentrate.

“Are you sure this will work?” Wes Tannock's normally self-assured baritone rises at the end of his words, which are half challenge, half doubt. He steadies the swing with his foot, preventing it from swaying with his every movement.

Rap's hand slices the air. Since his is the hand holding the joint, his gesture is punctuated by an orange streak across the face of the night. He takes a deep drag and sucks in every ounce of smoke. His answer rides the exhale: “It'll work, man. Blow those fuckers away.” He passes the jay to Dana. “We've got to seize the time, that's all.” Rap speaks with a lateral lisp that could make him sound like Daffy Duck. Instead, it adds spice; he never bothers to avoid sibilants.

Dana, who leans against Rap's chest in spite of the heat, holds the dwindling joint to her lips and takes a hit. She leans her head back and blows the smoke out slowly. She lifts her hand and pushes her long, black, Indian-princess hair off her neck, then passes the joint to the thin, nervous girl who sits on the floor, her back propped up against the porch rail.

Jan takes the doobie. “But what if somebody gets hurt?” she asks. The jay sits in her hand, unsmoked. “Somebody besides the farmers and the pigs, I mean.”

“Hey, you're the one who got all psyched up about what happened to Belita,” Rap reminds her. “You were the one who said we had to do something.”

“And don't bogart that joint,” Tarky adds in a low growl. His black Armenian hair is shoulder-length; he looks like a Dutch Master. He perches on the porch railing, his hairy hand reaching for the marijuana. Jan hands it over without a word, without taking a drag herself.

This is unusual; Jan passing up a chance to get high.

“You agreed to it ten minutes ago,” Dana reminds her. She passes the ice cream to Cass without eating any. This is not unusual; Dana is always trying to lose weight, to coerce her stocky frame into hip-huggers.