Revolution Number 9

by Peter Abrahams

  He pulled the board closed behind him and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Maybe they did, but he still couldn’t see anything. He smelled dampness and animal feces. A bug, perhaps a spider, ran quickly across the back of his neck. Blake moved toward the base of the house. He knew he was there when his head bumped something hard.

  He stretched out his hand, through cobwebs, and felt around. The house was built on pilings, disguised by a breakaway front. He touched a cement-block support, felt the opening beside it, and above the opening, little more than a foot above, the cement foundation. Dragging the knapsack, he squirmed around the piling and into the space under the ROTC building. It was quiet. Blake heard nothing but his own breathing, and between breaths, the Big Ben bedside clock ticking in the backpack.

  There wasn’t room to crawl. Blake made his way under the house on his belly, like a soldier advancing under enemy fire. After ten or twenty feet, his free hand encountered something hard and rough. He explored its surface: it was a cement block. He felt others around it, lying loose, perhaps forgotten there by workers. He patted down a shallow depression in the earth, dry here under the center of the house, and laid the knapsack in it. Then he dragged three cement blocks over it—two on the bottom, one on top, like a pyramid—and backed out, all the way to the space under the steps. He paused there for a moment, listening and hearing nothing, then pushed open the loose end of the plywood board and crawled out. He picked himself up, pushed the board back in place, and walked back to Cullen House. The bell in the campanile rang twice as he went by.

  Blake entered the lobby of Cullen House. A girl in a man’s button-down shirt was sleeping in a leather club chair, a telephone in her lap, her head tilted sideways, mouth sagged open. Blake went quietly up the stairs.

  A bar of light leaked out from under the door of the SA’s room on the first floor, and with it the smell of burning cannabis. From somewhere in the house came once more the sound of The White Album, as though it were pervasive on campus, a feature of the local climate, like one of those winds that have a name. It was the same song he had heard before, and now he remembered its name: “Cry Baby Cry.” The one that came before the long experimental song, the song that Malik had said went nowhere.

  Blake reached the third floor, walked to the east end of the hall, opened the unnumbered door. It was dark inside. He switched on the light. No one was there.

  Blake saw himself in the mirror. His clothes were dirty, his face unhappy. He got a towel, walked down the hall to the bathroom, showered, and looked in the mirror again. Now he was clean, but the expression on his face hadn’t changed. Blake climbed into bed. He lay there for a while, heard the bell ring three, fell asleep. He dreamed of baseball.

  Blake slept, but not deeply. When the door opened, he awoke at once. He heard Rebecca whisper, “You’re wrong,” and Malik answer, “Am I?”

  Blake said: “Wrong about what?”

  The light went on. Blake sat up, blinking. Rebecca and Malik stood side by side in the doorway; she held a red rose. Their eyes were dark and wide, as though they’d dropped acid, but Blake knew that couldn’t be. Drugs were bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. The world had to be seen as it was, in all its ugliness, before there could be any change.

  “You’re a cool one,” Malik said to him.

  “Cool?”

  “Sleeping like a baby. Did you do it?”

  “Yeah,” Blake said, trying not to look so cool.

  “Where?” Rebecca said.

  “Where?”

  “This isn’t a game,” Malik said, coming forward. “Wake up. Where’d you put the goddamned thing?” Blake had never heard him speak like that before. He was often sarcastic, often unpleasant, but never coarse. It angered Blake for some reason.

  He got out of bed, naked, and by far the physically strongest person in the room. Malik backed up, half a step, but he backed up. Blake started pulling on clothes. “I planted it on the altar in the chapel,” he said, hearing his own voice, now sarcastic and unpleasant too, almost like a stranger’s. “Where do you think I put it? By the door of the ROTC, like we planned.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “In the bushes by the stairs.” Blake studied them for a moment. “Where’ve you two been?”

  Rebecca and Malik glanced at each other. “We went for a walk,” Rebecca answered. “I’m too wired to sleep.”

  “We discussed the statement,” Malik said.

  “What statement?”

  “The statement I’m calling the press with after the … after.” Malik took an envelope from his pocket. The back of it was covered in writing; Blake thought of the Gettysburg Address. This was different: “We, the People’s Revolutionary Faction, claim responsibility for this brave and necessary act of protest. U.S. out of Cambodia, out of Laos, out of Vietnam. Smash imperialism. Stop the killing. Stop the war. Now.”

  “I don’t like that ‘Now,’ ” Rebecca said. “It doesn’t read well.”

  “It doesn’t?” Malik said. He scratched it out.

  Then their dark, wired eyes were on him again. “People’s Revolutionary Faction?” Blake said.

  “We need a name of some—” Rebecca began, but Malik interrupted:

  “Can you come up with something better?”

  Big Ben’s Bombers, Blake thought, and might have said it aloud, but at that moment the bell in the campanile rang four. At the end of the fourth ring there was silence in the room. Blake noticed grass stains on the knees of Rebecca’s jeans. And Malik’s. “You checked up on me.”

  They didn’t reply.

  “That wasn’t smart,” Blake said. “What if you were seen?”

  “We weren’t,” Malik said.

  Silence. Malik and Rebecca checked their watches at the same moment. Then she moved away from him, moving closer to Blake.

  “You didn’t trust me,” he said; he had an irresistible urge to keep playacting.

  “He wasn’t sure you’d do it,” she explained. She turned to Malik and spoke to him in a tone Blake had never heard her use on him before, cold and without deference. “But now he knows he was wrong.”

  Malik looked at her, looked at Blake, smoothed his mustache. “I owe you an apology,” he told Blake.

  “Forget it,” Blake said, and felt laughter rising inside him, the giddy laughter of someone with a good secret. He swallowed it with difficulty. Surely they noticed this mirth, he thought. But they didn’t. They were checking their watches again.

  “Christ, it’s hot,” Malik said. He opened a window, gazed out in the direction of the central quad, hidden by a line of oaks. “I could use a drink.”

  “I think there’s some rum,” Rebecca said.

  “Rum?”

  “I brought it back from St. Kitts.”

  Malik frowned. Vacations in St. Kitts were bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, and he didn’t want to be reminded of hers; but he didn’t stop Rebecca from opening a drawer in her desk and fishing out a bottle of Mount Gay, still in its gift package. She unscrewed the cap on the bottle. Malik switched off the light.

  They sat on the floor, Blake, Rebecca, Malik. There were no glasses. They drank from the bottle, passing it around in the dark. Blake felt the night coming in through the window, soft and smelling of flowers. He filled his lungs with the sweetness of the night and imagined himself with Rebecca in St. Kitts. He’d never been to St. Kitts, or anywhere really, but he pictured a white beach, a moonlit swim, silver tips on black waves. Eating strange fat tropical fruit, lying in the surf, making love under a whirling fan: heaven.

  “Four twenty-eight,” Malik whispered.

  Blake felt Rebecca’s hand on his thigh. She squeezed, with enough force to hurt. Rebecca and Malik were listening so hard he could feel them doing it. He moved his hand, encountered the bottle sitting on the floor by his knee. He picked the bottle up, tipped it to his lips, but it was already empty.

  Malik swallowed. Blake couldn’t see him, but he could hear the movement in his
throat. “Four thirty-three,” Malik whispered. Rebecca squeezed Blake’s thigh again, harder than before. Blake began to feel sleepy. He stifled a yawn, then another, but the third one escaped.

  “You’re a fucking natural at this,” said Malik, no longer whispering, “aren’t you?”

  Blake laughed, a short, sharp bark that almost led to a laughing fit.

  “Sh,” said Rebecca.

  Blake was quiet. He wondered how long they would wait before giving up. He felt like Machiavelli’s prince.

  “Four-forty.” There was a doubtful note in this announcement, and Rebecca caught it.

  “Did you set it right?”

  “Four-thirty. On the dot.” Malik’s voice rose in annoyance.

  “Sh,” said Rebecca. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  It doesn’t matter anyway? Blake might have pursued the thought, but the next minute the sound of whistling came through the window, human whistling, very near. It was tuneful whistling, but high and light, the way a child might whistle. The whistler came close, closer, was right below the window, then receded, farther and farther away, and finally out of range. Blake recognized the tune. It was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  “What the fuck was that?” said Malik, trying and failing to keep his voice low; it cracked and wavered in pitch.

  “Be quiet,” said Rebecca, her voice low and clear, with no wavering or cracking.

  She’s a natural too, Blake thought. Especially since she thinks a bomb’s going to go off. He roughed out answers to the interrogation that would come when they made the decision to stop sitting there in wait, answers based on the crudeness of Stu Levine’s translation and of the original design.

  Malik whispered: “Where’s that bottle?”

  Blake handed the empty bottle to him in the darkness.

  Pause.

  “Christ.”

  “Sh.”

  The bottle rolled across the floor.

  “Sh.”

  “Christ.”

  “Shut up.”

  Blake felt their tension rising and rising. How would they accept the fact that it was a dud like the first one? After all that rising, what would the fall be like? Blake turned his head, noticed that the rectangle of window wasn’t quite so black now. Rebecca and Malik emerged from the darkness as silhouettes, no longer invisible. The Malik silhouette moved.

  “Four fifty-four,” he said.

  Blake rose and went to the window. In the east colors were leaking into the black sky in tidy bands—pink, purple, green, and the blue-white of skim milk. Slowly the hills beyond the playing fields came into view, turning dusty rose. It was beautiful. Blake watched until his eyelids grew heavy. He yawned again.

  The chapel bell began to ring. Bong. Bong. Blake turned his head slightly, could just see the tip of the campanile over the tall oaks. Bong. Bong. The break of dawn was beautiful, and the campus was beautiful too, he thought, and he was glad that—

  He saw a flash of light. A tremendous flash of light. And then—

  Boom. A tremendous boom.

  The young woman with the Odilon Redon book was sleeping when the bus pulled into the station and came to a stop. “Excuse me,” Charlie said.

  She awoke with a start, eyes wide and afraid, staring at him without comprehension. “We’re there,” Charlie said.

  “Shit,” she said. “Was I asleep?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Oh, God. I’m not ready.”

  “Not ready?”

  “For the exam, what else?” She got up, stuffed the book angrily into an overfull bag, then sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “No?”

  “I’m switching to business in the fall.”

  She hurried off the bus. Charlie followed more slowly. It must have been a warm night—people around the bus station were lightly dressed—but Charlie felt cold.

  It doesn’t matter anyway.

  A single taxi waited. Charlie approached. Through the open window he heard: “And that one’s low and away.” The driver looked at him. “Fuckin’ Red Sox,” he said.

  Charlie got in the back. “Stuart Levine Industries,” he said, and gave the driver the address. The window slid up, the cab jerked out into traffic.

  It doesn’t matter anyway, he thought. It doesn’t matter anyway.

  He said: “Mind turning down the air-conditioning?”

  The driver said: “It’s not on, pal.”

  The announcer said: “Ball four. That loads ’em up.”

  The driver said: “Fuckin’ Red Sox.”

  15

  “Wow,” cried Malik, pounding Blake on the back as though he had just won a big game. “Oh, wow.” He put his arms around Blake and hugged him, then clapped his hands and came close to jumping up and down. “We did it, man. We did it.”

  “Blake did it,” Rebecca said, “and keep your voice down.”

  That was no longer necessary. Somewhere in Cullen House a door banged open; then came running footsteps on the stairs. Rebecca drew closer to Blake and Malik by the window, draped her arms over their shoulders. “We all did it, of course,” she said. “But Blake is the one we owe.” Softly, she slid the tip of her finger into Blake’s ear and gave it a little twist. He jerked away, left the room, almost running, and went down the hall to the bathroom. There was a buzzing in his ears, an enormous weight crushing his chest. What had gone wrong?

  He saw himself again in a mirror. He looked the same, the same as always. How could that be? Had he somehow dreamed the whole thing, drunk a bottle of rum and fallen into a nightmare? No: somewhere someone shouted, an alarm began to ring, then another. It was all real, except for the unresponsive face in the mirror. Blake shaped his mouth in a silent scream, until the face in the mirror resembled the face of someone with a buzzing in his ears and a crushing in his chest, looked as though it might even scream. Blake got ready to scream. The door opened and Rebecca came in.

  He turned to her. She didn’t say a word. Perhaps his mouth was still not fully closed, had not quite resumed its screamless form. Rebecca grabbed him and drove her tongue into it. She reached down into his pants, roughly, and then his pants were around his ankles and Rebecca was on her knees and sucking his penis, roughly. Furiously. She used her hand, her lips, her tongue, her saliva, her teeth, raking him and raking him back and forth across the borderline of pain and pleasure, at the same time reaching down into her own jeans. The buzzing and crushing inside Blake grew to unbearable levels. He gazed down at the frenzy around his loins, helpless, and came and came. Sirens wailed.

  They went out into the hall. Malik was waiting by the door. People were running—barefoot people, half-dressed people, frightened people. They ran with them. Down the stairs, through the lobby, out the door, into a river of running people. They flowed with it, through the line of oaks, into the central quad, past the chapel. Dawn had fully broken now, flooding the physical world with the first, clearest light of day. And Blake, standing in a crowd of superexcited, almost hysterical human beings, saw:

  Two firetrucks parked on the grass in front of the ROTC building, engines running, firemen jumping out.

  And: A pile of rubble where the front of the building had been. The wooden steps, the door, the wall, the remodeled porch—all gone.

  And: The inside of the first floor all the way through the lobby to the staircase, as though it were an architect’s cutaway model. Something lay on the charred floor at the foot of the stairs.

  And: An ambulance, its door popping open and paramedics jumping out.

  And: Little fires burning here and there on the ground floor of the building, hoses uncoiling, an ax smashing through a splintered window frame, smoke rising above all.

  And: That something at the foot of the stairs.

  “One stick of dynamite?” Blake said. “One stick of dynamite did all that?”

  But no one heard him. Noise, cacophonous, incomprehensible human noise, rose from the crowd, the way the smoke was rising fr
om the rubble. A din, a babble, an uproar, but not loud enough to drown the buzzing in Blake’s head.

  Something was pressing against his back. Someone. Blake half turned. A man pushed by, his face intense, beyond intense, with powerful emotion. A woman in a nightdress and curlers came after him, clutching his shirttail to keep up. The man shoved his way through the crowd, broke free into the space in front of the rubble, the woman in the nightdress and curlers stumbling after him, her face distorted by fear, by terror. A fireman moved to block the man’s path. The man pushed him aside and kept going, through the smoke, into what was left of the building. The fireman recovered in time to get his hands on the woman. She beat on his chest, tried to struggle free. Her nightdress tore, exposing one of her breasts: fat, loose, long nippled, maternal.

  Then the man emerged from the smoke. His legs appeared first, bare legs: all he wore was his shirt, long enough to cover him to mid thigh. The noise of the crowd died at once, as though this were all being controlled by switches backstage. The man had tears streaming down his face and—

  Something in his arms.

  Someone. A person. A child. A boy.

  A boy in a baseball uniform. A navy shirt, white pants with navy pinstripes, navy stirrup socks, white cleats. The boy’s hands were crossed on his chest. In his hands was a baseball glove, a first baseman’s trapper, Blake saw, a southpaw’s trapper. He could even identify the make and model: Rawlings, Willie “Stretch” McCovey.

  The boy’s face was tilted toward the crowd. It looked absolutely unmarred, the face of a healthy eleven- or twelve-year-old who happened to be sleeping in the middle of a wild scene. But he wasn’t moving at all.

  The woman in the nightdress and curlers let out a sound then that Blake had no word to describe. It made the fireman loosen his grip. The woman tore loose, ran into the smoking rubble, looked down into the face of the still boy, fell on her knees, leaning against the bare legs of the tall man. She reached up for the cleated feet, took them in her hands and held them to her breast, started rocking and didn’t let go, not for as long as Blake was watching.