Special Topics in Calamity Physics (70 page)

I hung up (infinitely reassured; Dad's voice was a pack of ice on a sprain). I collected my CASE NOTES and raced downstairs to the kitchen to brew some coffee. ("Experience, intellectual prowess, forensics, fingerprints, footprints—sure, they're important," wrote Officer Christina Vericault on

p. 4
of The Last Uniform
[1982]. "But the essential element of crime solving is a fine French Roast or Colombian blend. No murder will be solved without it.") After jotting down a few additional details from the Ada Harvey conversation, I hurried downstairs to Dad's study, switching on the lights.

Dad had only written one relatively short piece about The Nightwatchmen, published in 1998,
"Nachtlich:
Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting." Every now and then, too, for his Civil War seminars, he included on reading lists a more extensive commentary about their methodologies, an essay out of Herbert Littleton's
Anatomy of Materialism
(1990), "The Nightwatchmen and Mythical Principles of Practical Change." With little trouble, I located both on the bookshelf (Dad always purchased five copies of any
Federal Forum
issue in which he was featured, not unlike a paparazzi-hungry starlet when her picture graces "Around Town" in
Celebrastory Weekly).

I returned to Dad's desk with the two publications. To the left of his laptop sat a hefty stack of legal pads and various folded foreign newspapers. Curious, I paged through them, my eyes having to adjust to decode his barbed-wire handwriting. Unfortunately, their subject matter had nothing to do with The Nightwatchmen or the whereabouts of George Gracey (thus paralleling Smoke's story like a dream). Instead, they featured Dad's obvious cause célèbre, civil upheaval in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other nations of Central Africa. "When Will Killing Stop?" demanded the awkwardly translated editorials in
Afrikaan News,
the small Cape Town political newspaper. "Where Is Champion for Freedom?"

I put those papers aside (returning them to their original order; Dad knew snooping the way dogs smell fear) and began my orderly investigation into The Nightwatchmen (or
"Mai addormentato"
as they were called in Italian). First, I read Dad's
Federal Forum
article. Second, I browsed the long-winded Chapter 19 in the
Little
ton book. Lastly, I turned on Dad's laptop and searched for the group on the Internet.

In the years since 1998, the number of pages referencing the radicals had mushroomed; the 100,000 had become 500,000.1 scanned as much as I could, no resource excluded for bias, romanticism or even conjecture ("Within prejudice grows all kinds of remarkable truths," Dad said): encyclopedias, history texts, political Web sites, Leftist blogs, Communist and Neo-Marxist sites (a favorite, www.thehairyman.com—alluding to Karl Marx's lionlike appearance), conspiracy and anarchist Web sites, sites about cartels, cults, hero worship, urban legends, organized crime, Orwell, Malcolm X, Erin Brockovich and something out of Nicaragua called Champions of Che. It seemed the group was like Greta Garbo when she first went into retirement: mysterious, impossible to pin down and everyone wanted a piece of her.

It took me a little over an hour to look through everything.

When I finished, my eyes were red, my throat dry. I felt drained and yet—scandalously alive (pronounced "a-LIVE"), giddy as the bright green Darning Needle Dragonfly that careened into Dad's hair at Lake Pennebaker, making him dance like a marionette, go "Ahhhhh!" and barge through a crowd of geriatrics wearing yellow visors identical to the yellow halo Christ sports in old frescoes.

My heart-thumping excitement was not simply because I knew so much about The Nightwatchmen I felt oddly confident I could deliver a Dadified lecture on them, my voice a tidal wave, rising up, up over the shabbily combed heads of his students, and not because, rather incredibly, Ada Harvey's information had held up heroically upon further examination like the British blockade against the Germans in the First Battle of the Atlantic during World War I. My exhilaration wasn't even because Hannah Schneider—all that she'd done, her strange behaviors, her lies—had suddenly come crashing open at my feet like the outer stone sarcophagus of Pharaoh Heteraah-mes when Carlson Quay Meade, in 1927, fumbled his way through a murky mummy cache high up in the cliffs of the Valley of the Kings. (For the first time, I could crouch down, take my oil lantern directly to Hannah's bone-smooth face, see, in startling detail, its every angle and plane.)

It was something else, too, something Dad once said after recounting those final hours in the life of Che Guevara. "There is something intoxicating about the dream of liberty and those who risked their lives for it—particularly in this whiny day and age, when people can barely manage to roll off their Barcalounger to answer a doorbell for a pizza delivery, much less a cry for freedom."

I'd
solved
it.

I couldn't believe it. I'd recovered the values of both x and y (with the vital assistance of Ada Harvey; I wasn't vain like many applied mathematicians, desperate to appear unaccompanied in the Annals of History). And I felt both terror and awe—what Einstein experienced in the middle of the night in 1905 in Bern, Switzerland, after waking from a nightmare in which he'd witnessed two pulsing stars crashing together creating strange waves in space—a vision that would inspire his General Theory of Relativity.

"It vas ze sceriest end most beautiful sing I haf ever seen," he said.

I hurried over to Dad's bookshelf again, this time pulling Colonel Helig's treatise on murder from the shelf,
Machinations Idyllic and Unseen
(1889). I paged through it (so old, pages 1-22 dandruffed out of the spine), searching for the passages that would cast the last puddles of light on this sprawling truth I'd uncovered, this surprising—and obviously, treacherous—New World.

The oddest insight into the workings of The Nightwatchmen (an incident Dad would deem evidence of "a legend's potential to be worn like a trench coat, used for good, warding off the rain, and evil, streaking through a park, frightening children") was an episode detailed on www.goodrebels .net/nw, in which two eighth graders from an affluent Houston suburb committed suicide together on January 14,1995. One of them, a thirteen-year-old girl, had written a suicide note—posted on the Web site—and in stark handwriting, on frighteningly sweet stationery (pink, rainbows) she'd written: "We hereby eliminate our selfs in the name of The Nightwatch Men and to show our parents their money is dirty. Death to all oil pigs."

The creator of the site (when you clicked on "About Randy" he revealed himself to be an emaciated woolly-mammoth type with a serious red mouth zipped tightly into his face, of indeterminate age) complained about this, the "heritage" of The Nightwatchmen being abused in such a fashion, because "nowhere in their manifestos do they say kill yourself because you're rich. They're champions against capitalist abuses, not wacko members of the Manson Family." "Death to all pigs," of course, was written in blood on the front door of Cielo Drive (see
Blackbird
Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles Milles Manson,
Ivys, 1985, p. 226).

According to most sources, Randy was correct; nowhere in the manifestos of
Na
chtlich
did they urge suicide under any circumstance. In fact, there were no manifestos at
all
penned by the group, no pamphlets, brochures, outlines, recorded sound-bites or fervently worded essays detailing their intentions. (It was a choice Dad would deem remarkably astute: "If rebels never broadcast who they are, their enemies will never be sure of what they're fighting.") The only paper evidencing the group's existence was a single notebook page attributed to George Gracey, dated July 9, 1971, marking the birth of The Nightwatchmen—at least, as the nation, the police and the FBI knew it. (It wasn't a welcomed nativity; The Establishment already had their hands full with the Weather Underground, Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society, among a handful of other "hallucinating hippie quacks," as Dad called them.)

On that day in 1971, a Meade, West Virginia, policeman discovered this notebook page Scotch-taped to a telephone pole ten feet from where Senator Michael McCullough's white Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-five had exploded in a wealthy residential community known as Marlowe Gardens. (Senator Michael McCullough climbed inside and was killed instantly in the blast.)

The Nightwatchmen's sole manifesto could be read on www.mindfucks .net/gg (and Gracey was no Spelling Bee Winner): "Today dies a crooked and gluttonus man" —it was true, at least literally; McCullough allegedly weighed three hundred pounds and suffered from scoliosis—"a man who gets rich by the suffering of women and children, a greedy man. And so I, and the many with me, will be The Nightwatchmen, helping to divest this nation and the world of the capitalistic greed contemptuous of human life, undermining democrisy, blindfolding its people, forcing them to live in the dark."

Dad and Herbert Littleton supplied insight into the objectives of The Nightwatchmen, inferred from the 1971 assassination, as well as Gracey's subsequent explosion of an office building in downtown Houston on October 29, 1973. Littleton reasoned Senator McCullough had become the group's first known assassination due to his involvement in a 1966 toxic waste scandal. Over seventy tons of toxic waste had been dumped illegally into the West Virginia Pooley River by Shohawk Industries, a textiles manufacturing plant, and by 1965, the tiny, impoverished coal mining towns of Beudde and Morrisville had suffered an increase in cancer among its low-income population. When the scandal broke, McCullough, then the governor, voiced his outrage and grief and his highly publicized, heroic mandate to clean up the river, never mind the price tag (what it cost taxpayers), had won him a seat in the senate the following election year (see "Governor McCullough Visits Five-year-old Boy with Leukemia,"
Anatomy,
Littleton, p. 193).

In truth, however, in 1989, Littleton exposed McCullough had not only known about the dumping, and the toll it would take on the communities downstream, but he'd actually been well compensated for keeping mum, an amount estimated between $500,000 and $750,000.

The Houston bombing of 1973 illustrated, according to Dad, The Nightwatchmen's resolve to wage war against "capitalistic greed and exploitation on a global scale." The target was no longer a single man but the corporate headquarters of Oxico Oil & Gas (OOG). An AN/FO-based (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil) explosive was planted on the executive floor by George Gracey masquerading as a maintenance man; a security camera taped him hobbling out of the building early that morning, as well as two other figures wearing ski masks beneath janitor caps—one purportedly a woman. The blast killed three high-ranking executives, including the company's long-time President and CEO, Carlton Ward.

Littleton contended the assault was provoked by Ward's approval, in 1971, of a secret cost-saving initiative for Oxico's South American oil refining interests. The proposal outlined that Oxico should stop lining their crude oil waste pits throughout refinery fields in Ecuador, allowing seepage and severe environmental contamination, yet saving $3 per barrel—an action "illustrative of the flagrant disregard for lost human life in favor of amiable profit margins." By 1972, toxic drilling waters were actively contaminating the freshwater supply of more than thirty thousand men, women and children; and by 1989, five different indigenous cultures faced not only escalating cancer rates and severe birth defects but also total extinction (see "Girl Without Legs,"
Anatomy,
Littleton, p. 211).

The Houston bombing marked a sea change in tactics for The Night-watchmen. It was then, according to Dad, that "the reality of whiny radicals ended and the legend began." The Oxico executive assassinations disheartened (others said "defeated") the sect; it did nothing to modify South American refinery policies—it only strengthened building security, forced the maintenance crews to suffer increasingly vigorous background checks, many losing their jobs; and an innocent secretary, a mother of four, had been killed in the explosion. Graeey was forced to go underground. The second to last confirmed sighting of him was in November 1973, a month after the Houston bombing; he was spotted in Berkeley, California, eating at a diner close to the university with an "unidentified dark-haired child, a girl between thirteen and fourteen years of age."

If The Nightwatchmen had once been highly visible —if solely through their use of explosives —in January 1974, Graeey and the twenty to twenty-five other members resolved to carry out their goals wholly unseen, according to Dad, "without pomp and circumstance." While most revolutionaries (even Che himself) might consider such a move unwise and self-defeating—"What is civil war if it isn't fought in the open, deafeningly, colorfully, so the masses are encouraged to take up arms/' contends Lou Swann, Dad's artless Harvard peer who'd penned the well-received
Iron Hands
(1999); "He purloined my title," Dad noted sourly—it was actually a strategic shift Dad would deem both clever and highly sophisticated. In his various essays on insurrection, Dad maintained: "If fighters for liberty are forced to use violence, they must do it silently to be effective in the long term" (see "Cape Town Fear," Van Meer,
Federal Forum,
Vol. 19, Issue 13). (This actually wasn't Dad's idea; he'd plagiarized it from
La Grimace
[Anonyme, 1824].)