The Republic of Nothing (30 page)

Nothing I'd ever known on Whalebone Island in the Republic of Nothing had prepared me for this. “Gwen, are you sure you want to get involved in this? Are you sure you're okay?” She had just been through a heck of a lot and, to tell you the truth, I didn't trust this crowd. All around us people were holding up placards against the war and shouting, “No War!” or “Impeach Nixon!” They were loud and they were angry.

“I'm okay. Ian, I'm really glad we're here for this. I'm tired of watching the protests on TV and we're here now. We can finally do something, let the world know that we want the war stopped.

Somebody was starting up a chant of, “Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh. If he can't do it, no one can.” It was like a cheer from a soccer game back at high school.

Gwen was leading me now towards a table where a couple of long-hair freaks were handing out placards. I held onto
Gwen's hand, afraid I'd lose her in this mob and never see her again. If I could have had my way, I would have told Gwen that we had to leave. It looked like trouble to me. We'd been through enough in Boston. Couldn't we just go to a museum as planned, or even a Boston Red Sox game? I liked those lies we threw around and wanted to go home having done something that I could say was true. We weren't scheduled to be on the plane until 6:30. We could just take a nice easy day, get out to the airport in time and be home, asleep in our beds, ready for school tomorrow. It could be that easy.

“Where you from?” the guy handing out protest signs asked. “Who do you represent?” The guy was maybe a couple of years older than us. With his long hair he looked so much like the paintings of Jesus Christ in my Bible back home that I did a double take.

“We're from Canada,” Gwen said. “We want to march with you.

“Right on,” Jesus said. He pulled out a massive magic marker and began to produce a masterfully psychedelic scripted message on the posterboard reading, “Canadians Against the War!” He handed it to Gwen. I could hear the guy with the megaphone trying to get people to line up for the march and everyone began to shuffle in that direction. “We don't have an official permit for this march,” said the voice, “because the pigs wouldn't give us one. They said they won't recognize our march as legitimate.”

Everyone booed.

“That means that they might come and try to bust a few heads. But they can't stop us because we are here to end the war. People all across America are out on the streets today. We might not do it today, we might not do it tomorrow, but we're gonna get this thing stopped and nothing can push us back!”

A cheer went up. We were moving now. I felt like a cell in a blood stream. Thousands of people around us. We were moving in the middle of a mass of Americans out exercising
their right of free speech, only something in the bureaucracy wasn't quite right and we were all part of an illegal march. People began to sing, “We shall overcome,” and I suddenly thought I was going to cry. It's funny how just then I was thinking of Burnet. Would he be in Nam yet? Probably still in training. I began to realize that the guy on the horn was telling the truth. How could a war continue if a tide of protest like this was going on across the country, if it was happening week after week? I truly didn't want Burnet to come home in a body bag. I think at that moment, tagging along with Gwen whose face was radiant with the passion of a righteous cause, I still felt a hatred for Burnet for seducing Gwen, for getting her pregnant; and then I hated him because he had gone off to be a soldier, to fight for the Americans. He was the perfect sucker for a government that had to preach and package hate in order to create and prolong a war that nobody would have other-wise wanted. It would always be so easy to sell hate.

But most of all, I can now admit, I wanted the war to end because I didn't want to see Burnet come home a hero. I didn't want to believe that you could go away from home, maim and kill and destroy in the name of a patriotic cause and then come back a winner. The irony of Gwen falling for a guy who craved going to war still haunted me. Sure, I knew that Gwen's motives of protest were pure. How could they be otherwise? But now I knew that mine were different. I wanted the war to end quickly so Burnet would never have a chance to fight, never have a chance to come home and gloat and probably get his way for the rest of his life. I wanted to save his stupid ass so he couldn't be a stupid hero, dead or alive. I took the placard from Gwen and held it high in the air. Then I joined her in singing, “We shall overcome some day.” We both had our back packs and I didn't want her to have to carry anything else.

“This is beautiful,” Gwen said. “I think we should stay here in Boston and work for the peace movement.”

I pretended I didn't hear her over the chanting of the crowd.
She did it again; she just scared me to death. We had to go back to school. We couldn't throw that away. I decided I would say nothing. Once again, Gwen had made a leap I was not ready for. How could I ever hold her back? How could I hold onto her? I couldn't live in Boston. I couldn't give up my family and my island. I knew that I had to be sure she was on that plane with me today, no matter what.

Our island seemed so far away as we walked toward the centre of the city and the buildings grew taller all around. Marchers shouted slogans for peace or against war and, as we passed each side street, I saw groups of policemen. They had on helmets and were carrying wooden clubs. I heard their bull horns telling us this was an illegal march and that we should disperse, but not one person was intimidated. I tried to glimpse forward and back to see how many people were actually marching, but I could tell nothing except the fact that there was a flood of protesters as far forward and as far back as I could see. The immensity of the crowd scared me, but if I looked sideways at a stranger who gave me eye contact I would receive a flash of the two-finger V and a warm smile.

There was a division in the street ahead where a small park interrupted the normal flow of the traffic. We were pretty far back from the lead; I could see that the crowd was divided into two now as it streamed around the little triangular park. At the centre was a monument to war and it was being guarded by a group of maybe twenty cops. I saw the hippie with the megaphone try to walk up onto the steps of the monument. At first the police looked like they were going to let him through, but then one of the troopers decided to stop him. The war memorial was surrounded now on all sides by the marchers, thousands of them.

Our leader, still wielding the megaphone, turned back to the crowd and said, “Remember, whatever happens, we are messengers of peace. No violence. No fighting. Passive resistance will stop this war. Peace above all things.” With that a
night stick came down with a hard crack on his head. He slumped onto the steps of the war memorial. A roar went up from the crowd, and all at once, as if a giant living thing, it began to press in towards the centre. The cops left in the middle protecting the monument looked as if they could be crushed. They held up plexiglass shields and began to wave their clubs blindly at anyone who came near.

Gwen was craning her neck, trying to get a look. “What's happening?” she asked.

I tried to edge us away from the centre of the crowd. Already I was feeling as if we were being compressed, packed tight by the hundreds of people surging forward. It was very scary. Up at the monument I heard a pop and saw two small clouds of smoke. “Tear gas,” I said. “I have to get you out of here.” Then I heard women screaming and I heard the pounding of horse's hooves on pavement. The police were trying to get in to rescue their fellow cops who were trapped inside the mob. They were charging through the streets, scattering the marchers into smaller groups. I heard another pop and saw another cloud.

Pure white terror went through me as people began to drop their signs and try to run. A new batch of uniforms on horses stationed themselves several yards away from us in a line. They had on helmets with dark plexiglass shields so you couldn't see their faces. They carried long wooden clubs and I could see that the numbers on their badges were taped over. I dropped my sign, held tightly onto Gwen's hand and tried to squeeze us out of the crowd. But there was nowhere to go. One young woman reached up to grab the bridle of one of the horses and she was immediately cracked on the head with a stick. I could see blood on her face as she fell to the ground. Four protesters grabbed the cop and pulled him off the horse onto the street. All around I could hear people screaming and crying. I could hear police shouting orders to disperse. But for us there was no place to go.

Our section of the protest, cut off from the rest, was being surrounded by twenty or so horseback policemen and we were being pushed up against the giant glass wall of a bank tower. If Gwen was scared, she didn't show it. I saw only defiance in her face. Any minute she might do something really stupid. We slipped to the back of the crowd, but there was nowhere left to go. We were right up against the green glass wall and people were crushing in on us as the horses paced slowly forward. A whiff of the gas made my eyes water, my mouth sting. Gwen began to cough. Out on the street, I saw bodies of protesters writhing in pain from injuries or from the gas. Hundreds of other protesters simply lay down right in the street, surrounded by dozens of uniforms. We were being crushed now, surrounded on three sides by men on horses slowly but steadily inching in, purposefully jamming us against glass and concrete. I held on tight to Gwen. She shouted out, “It doesn't matter what you do to us. We'll stop the war.” Others shouted too as we found it getting harder and harder to breathe. Someone began to cry hysterically. “Back off!” somebody screamed.

We were trapped. Now we were going to be crushed. Certainly they were doing more than just their duty. It was impossible to see their faces; they were faceless, emotionless machines doing the will of the government.

More people began to scream and hysteria was sweeping the crowd. I felt the glass behind me actually beg;in to flex like a weak skin of ice on the surface of a newly frozen pond. We were about to be crushed to death or killed in an explosion of broken glass. A woman fell under the hooves of the horse and she shrieked. Except for the cry of the injured, a curious quiet had come over the crowd and as I looked around I saw pure, undiluted terror in the faces around me.

Why I did what I did next cannot be fully explained. Desperate options come from deep within. Maybe it was my mother, although it was so absurd that it seems unlikely it
would have been in her psychic bag of tricks. Maybe it was one of those vague, distant spirits I had met in a dream. I knew I had to do something. It was just like someone had thrown a switch. And what I did was begin to sing, “Oh Canada.” I sang it like I was a kid in grade two who would belt it out on a good morning as he just arrived at school. I'm sure it must have sounded off-key and warbly as I belted out, “Oh Canada, glorious and free!”

My guess is that most people in the crowd, including the cops whose horses were in breathing distance of my face, had never heard the national anthem of their northern neighbour. Gwen joined in, sounding shaky but celestial. And at that moment the horses stopped, backed off ever so slightly. This mob, taut as a living, single wild creature, suddenly relaxed its communal muscle. One single policemen lifted his face shield and looked straight at me. Horses shuffled backwards and protesters began to leak out of the crushed crowd from the sides. Gwen sang a few more lines, stumbled on the words and then stopped, out of breath. The only cop with a face was looking straight at me and, in his eyes, I recognized pure hate. He had wanted to see us cave the glass wall in. He wanted to see blood and jagged glass driven into the bodies of anyone who would speak out against the American war. He had that ugly passion of a true patriot in his eyes.

I could not look away from his face. I should have sidled out of there like the others, safe now on the side street and making a run for freedom. But there was something in the locked horns of our stare. It was what I felt then and what he told me in his silence that suddenly made me understand war, understand how someone becomes an enemy. I blinked back my hate and tried to move away with Gwen, but he was headed toward us. I could see the eyes even better, see the puffy, half-shaven face. Whatever level of calm had overtaken me to save us all with a national anthem was now gone. I felt animosity, not for anything this man had done but for the
fiendish look in his face. Gwen was tugging at my sleeve now. We had a clear exit, we could have got away but I stood my ground. He towered above me now, his foaming horse breathing heavily. I saw the billy club raised. Why would he use it on me if I was posing no physical threat? I believed that this was the line he would not cross over. He would not actually hit me because, I wanted to believe, there was still some common bond of humanity that would prevent him from hitting an un-armed good intentioned kid from Nova Scotia.

I was looking at his face, his eyes. I saw the stick raised in the air, saw it shudder and hesitate, and then without seeing it, I could feel the air slice, feel it descending towards my head. I dodged out of its way and as I did, I saw Gwen dive forward at him. I screamed. She was about to take the goddamn thing on her own skull to save me. I knew I had made a big mistake. We should have run. But another hand, the anonymous hand of a fellow protester, had reached up and grabbed the end of the stick and was trying to pull the cop off his horse. Gwen grabbed the cop's wrist and was biting it hard enough to draw blood. The horse reared up and I nearly fell over backwards but kept my footing enough to pull Gwen off the policeman and away as the horse came back down on all fours and a can of tear gas went off.

We got far enough away from the gas so that we were not blinded with tears or choking, but we were disoriented and shaky enough that two other patrolmen on foot came up and pushed our arms up against our backs. “We saw that,” one of them said. “You're both under arrest.” They handcuffed us and led us quickly to a nearby van. We were thrown into the back of the paddy wagon onto the floor. The truck was nearly full of other protesters. We lay panting and coughing, and it took some time before I could speak. I pulled Gwen up off the floor as the truck began to speed off. “You all right?” I saw blood on her mouth. “Are you hurt?”