Once

Winner of the 2027 Pushcart Prize

Before wearable phones, when Americans debated the right and wrong of a foreign war but not yet the possible end of democracy, Tres DeLuca picked up the extension in her bedroom at the wrong time. She recognized the voice but the tone was new, the unaccountable tremor. She tried to put the receiver back in its cradle like a newborn chick into its nest, but her hand was shaking. She heard the whispered response. “Hush, Harold.” Harold was her father. The whisperer was not her mother.

The next morning as always her brother went off to day camp, her parents to their high-end jobs. Robby picked her up as planned in the car he’d got for his birthday, and they drove to the city.

It was late August 1968, school to start soon but not yet. Tres and Robby lived in Highland Park, a place of intact families and clean, gently curving streets, where children rode their happy bicycles and nothing ever happened. In the city of Chicago, things were happening. The Democrats were smack dab in the middle of their convention. Lives rode upon it, or Robby’s did, a year away from his draft registration.

But today their concerns were more immediate. Robby had quit the tennis team for reasons he hadn’t shared. Tres’s father was having an affair or on the verge of one. And Robby’s dad had a downtown apartment where she and Robby were going. To have sex, the first time for both. Sex being in Chicago 1968 a locked room you were dared to break into. Where you would meet either your primal fear or an inconceivable joy, fountainhead of your personal power.

Practical matters were already in hand: the door key; rubbers. Next on their agenda was scoring a joint. They headed for Old Town, a likely source for what they termed (wittily, Tres thought) their needed refreshment.

Old Town, known for artists and sleaze, was shiny bright in the late morning, little shops selling fudge and popcorn, campaign buttons, engraved brass hookahs. A little girl hopped down the sidewalk licking a rainbow-swirled sucker as big as her face. A boy perched on a wrought iron banister asked Tres for a quarter, and she emptied her change purse into his hand. He was barefoot, maybe ten years old, with an oozing cut on his knee. “Spare grass?” he said, and then, “Spare acid?” From a giant pipe in front of a store called Bizarre Bazaar, clouds of soap bubbles floated up and away. Tres caught a whiff of what they’d come for, looked for the source: Not that middle-aged couple looking at a window display. Not that man in tie-dye selling The Chicago Seed. She put her arm through Robby’s. “Don’t you love it here?”

She loved how she looked in her long skirt and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that concealed her “midriff bulge” (that ugly word). Being tall, she could carry the extra weight, unlike those tiny Jewish girls, her mother would say, encouraging. Her thick dark hair, newly shampooed, felt beautiful on her bare shoulders. Her bra pushed the top of her breasts together like Brigitte Bardot’s. Robby was taller than she, even in sneakers. The thought of their lips coming together, the tips of his fingers on the slope between her breasts, made her feel melty. Iridescent. Till she thought of the phone call. Please, dear man, the woman had said, we can’t be talking like this. Nobody said “dear man.”

She couldn’t tell her mother, and she couldn’t not tell her.

Anxiety was poking its way in now. The people around them wore shorts, sandals, psychedelic or rock band T-shirts; her outfit was pretentious. That farm girl thinks she’s a hippie. In his polo and clean white tennies Robby too looked out of place in her opinion, like a kid from an East Coast boarding school. When she named her concern, he put on a fake English accent, “You appear to think we’re overdressed?” and hip-butted her toward a man in a Che Guevara tee. She almost bumped him. She almost yelled at Robby.

Robby was her best friend, but he wasn’t her boyfriend. She let him get away with things she’d have challenged in a boyfriend. They continued down Wells Street, Robby scanning the scene with intensifying gusto. “My God, look! Soul mates!”

In the parade of bare legs and primary colors were two men in tooled leather boots and long stiff jeans. One wore a cowboy hat. Robby opened his arms. Buttons on their shirts said NIXON’S THE ONE and DEFEAT = DISHONOR. Robby’s mocking grin widened. Tipping them an imaginary hat, he said to Tres in another of his voices, “Vich vun you vant?”

“Quit that,” she hissed. “I feel like an escaped mental patient.”

“But you look like an Earth Mother.” Gently, he pulled her into the shelter of his arm. “I’m a loudmouth, ignore me.”

They didn’t uncouple. But she had lost some of her zest. She believed in sharing emotional pain. Two hearts unburdening. She didn’t need a joint, just to sit with Robby and hear his story. Then lovemaking would commence spontaneously like birds launching into flight.

They moved with the crowd, past bars that looked dark and cool in the sunlight. Seeing one with the ironic name Mother’s, they palmed their fake IDs and walked in with composed adult faces. “I could use a beer,” Robby said to no one in particular. Tres reddened. The door guy brought one of their licenses up to the light with what seemed a needless flourish. “You guys remember Eisenhower? How about Sputnik?” Heads turned. The place was packed. “So, hombre,” he said to Robby, “you just get back from Nam?” There was laughter, a couple of hoots. “Who ya gonna vote for? Nixon, I’ll bet.” They scuttled out.

“That was heartening,” Robby said and kissed the side of her head. Which was kind of nice.

The marijuana smell got stronger as they neared Division Street. A dark-haired man who could have been eighteen or thirty stood in the doorway of a place called Marc of Cane. It was a tattoo parlor—Marcus and Jillian Cane, proprietors. Signs promised a friendly environment, free consultation, sterile needles, walk-ins welcome. The man, his back to the sidewalk, was smoking a joint. Tres and Robby followed him in.

The shop was ringed with chairs like a doctor’s waiting room, at the back a closed interior door. But there was no check-in desk, and in place of soothing landscapes the walls were lined with images: the faces of Albert Einstein and Jimi Hendrix, a Day-Glo elf, the devil. A snake emerging from a skull, a tiny rose, a heart, a swastika. Prices, five to five hundred dollars. Robby’s eyes shone like he was already stoned. “Want a tattoo?” he said to Tres. “I could use a power symbol.” He curled his arm to bulge the bicep. The room was empty except for the dark-haired man, who knocked on the interior door, then sat. His joint was gone. “Hombre,” said Robby, with a slightly rolled R. “Señor?” Receiving no response, he clarified, “Do you, uh, have any more of that, you know?” signifying their criminal brotherhood with the furtive lift of an eyebrow. “Of course, we’ll pay.”

The man’s glance seemed bored as well as sublimely patient, and he spoke with a perfect South Side accent: “Get the fuck away from me, you crazy faggot.”

The Millers’ city place was on the twentieth floor of the new Lake Point Tower. The apartment was small but designed to seem imposing with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Lake Michigan and south toward the Loop. Riding up in the mirrored elevator, they agreed the “hombre” was an asshole who merited no further mention. Now Robby strolled to the liquor cabinet. “May I offer you a highball, dear?”

“Certainly, dear,” she replied. Her heart was skittering. She had almost said “dear man.”

But she was glad to be here, and even glad their initial quest had failed. Marijuana didn’t always improve her mood. She’d start out giddily chatty but then turn inward, sometimes so far in she’d have to fight something close to panic. She stood at the window looking out at the lake, deep blue-green to the horizon. She sipped what Robby gave her. “Sweetheart darling,” she said, “shall we turn on the radio?”

He found a station playing Sgt. Pepper, all the songs in order. The main piece of living room furniture was an L-shaped burgundy-red leather couch, thick cushions happy to support them. They sat and sang along, Do you need anybody? / I need somebody to love, he, a third above the melody line, with a tremolo that mocked and heightened the song’s sweet achiness. Getting drunk was new to Tres and possibly interesting. Sky’s the limit, she said to herself, then aloud. Robby grinned, his eyes almost the same blue-green as the lake.

For a moment the tattoo parlor scene returned in its sheen of nastiness. She knew what “faggot” meant, but none of their friends used the word. They might say “fruit” to a boy who threw a ball awkwardly. “That queer,” you could say (sotto voce) of a girl who wore ankle socks with her off-brand penny loafers and didn’t know how to make a joke of it. But faggot made her spine contract, like the thought of kids who spent lunchtime alone or in sad quiet clusters, and especially Francine Rourke whom Liz Campbell in fifth grade had called Fancy Pork almost to her face, and Tres had laughed (laughed!) because Lizzie was her friend and because, compared to Francie, Tres looked almost slim, and how could she have let that asshole insult Robby and said nothing? She looked at Robby, who was on to the next song, Silently closing her bedroom door / Leaving the note that she hoped would say more . . . The Beatles gave way to local news. The Democratic National Convention was debating a peace plank. A march was being planned to honor someone killed by Chicago police. A boy, seventeen. Shot and killed last week, on Wells Street.

“Where we just were,” she breathed.

They moved closer together, where they could release their words like bubbles into the air. She told him about the phone call she’d overheard, the gist, not the words, squeezing her eyes shut against images.

“I hope you set them straight,” he said. “It’s a mortal sin.”

His face was relaxed, with bits of fun leaking out. Wry, he’d have termed it. “You think it’s funny?”

He fell to his knees, apologizing. He spoke as a Jew, he said, for all Jews or at least American Jews, who were taught to laugh (or smirk) when they wanted to cry. He was exaggerating, but he also meant it, and his sideways, sad, sorry glance lightened her burden of anguish. He held her hand to his cheek. “We’re from different cultures,” she cried, a concept from Social Studies that would enlarge one day into “diversity.” She loved their differences, and their unfurling knowledge of each other, which seemed to increase every time they got together. This summer, like best girlfriends, they met almost every day he didn’t have tennis practice. And now it came to her what she should have called the asshole in the tattoo parlor. Schmuck, a Jewish insult.

For some relaxing minutes she drank the liquor he’d poured, liking the bitterness that hung just behind the sweetness, a Jewish bitterness, and how smoothly and nimbly words of all kinds slid through her brain. She set her bare feet on the coffee table and admired their high arches, the long, adept-looking toes. They were pretty feet. She snagged a sandal with her big toe and pertly dangled it over his lap. “You know,” she said, “when someone insults me, it keeps circling in my brain. But you let it fly off. You don’t get depressed. I wish I could do that.” She released the sandal, which glanced off his knee on its path to the floor.

“When it threatens,” he said, “I do the first thing that comes to mind. Any craziness, however humiliating.”

Was he telling the truth? She thought so. “But then afterward, don’t you go over and over it in your mind, thinking of what you could have said that would have killed the guy deader than dead?”

“There madness lies.”

Tres had an internal register for her connections with people, and her great pleasure came from feeling a connection in the process of tightening. But with Robby, despite her attraction to him and all their time together, she sometimes lost their working link. He loved tennis, and he had quit. He said his coach, Gallagher, “had it in for him,” but he was number one on the team; his best friend Tom Scully was his doubles partner. If she told him exactly what she’d heard on the phone, she wondered, would he be equally frank? There was no guarantee. “Hey,” she said as if it hardly mattered, her interest oh-so-casual, “Are things okay with Scully?”

“Scully’s a twit.”

He didn’t sound especially angry. His eyes were thickly lashed, the blue-green darkening at the rim. No one, girls included, had more beautiful eyes. Shining in the light of his gaze on her, she touched his arm. He started batting his eyes like a film vamp. “She’s coming on to me! I’ve waited so long.”

“Stop it,” she said, though it sounded lame. This was his hateful part. It occurred to her she ought to be angry. Most girls would be angry. But she felt close to tears. “You mistake me,” she said with theatrical disdain.

“You mean, ‘Shut the fuck up, shithead!’”

With as much dignity as was summonable she took her glass to the liquor cabinet and refilled it, then turned to face him. “I said what I meant, schmuck.”

He cocked an ironic eyebrow, but his smile was so painfully wide she put a hand to her own jaw. This was something that hadn’t happened before or, if so, she hadn’t recognized it. He was strong enough to run down the street with her on his shoulders, but he was grinning like a clown. Like her father, she thought, who would head for the den or out to the yard when her mother started in on him. Tres had blamed her mom for nagging, but she felt bad for her now. Blame was so hard to place. “You try to hide it,” she said, “but you’re really a good person. I know that.”

“Don’t overdo it.”

“Why not? I mean to overdo it. Sometimes a person has to overdo it!”

She lay back against an arm of the couch and tucked her feet under his thigh, and he didn’t object. At peace with her current version of him, she sipped at her second drink. The radio was playing “Lucy in the Sky,” and they sang together, she holding to the melody line alongside his harmony. He had a beautiful voice. He also played beautiful tennis. She pictured his toss of the ball, the crook of the elbow of his racquet arm, the grace of its unfurling, how his body seemed to elongate, and the smash—snap/boing—the ball sent into some impossible corner faster than eye could see. She said to herself, I’m in love with this boy.

Giddy and brave now, she said in the voice of a sexy older woman, “Let’s go, hombre.” His theatrical uh oh ricocheted off the windows, but she put her arms around him. Outside, the sky was clear and blue. Liking her smoky forties movie actress voice, she pulled a lock of her wavy hair over one eye. “Pretend I’m Lauren Bacall. If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you?”

“Tres, this is kind of weird.”

She snorted. In their pantheon the best people were weird. “Pretend I’m Brigitte Bardot,” she said. “In the dark supposedly we all look alike, right?”

It wasn’t dark out. Heat was coming from his face. “It’ll be good, Robby. You’re my best friend on earth.”

Thoughts passed then for both of them without stopping to deposit their loads. Past and future lifted like helium balloons as hand in hand they walked into the bedroom. There was a bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers, in shadow. The blinds were drawn. There was no space but the space of the room, no time but now, nothing required but breathing, which ensued without effort or will. They removed all clothing except for underpants and jockeys, separately, like children. They folded back the bedspread, a team, and sat on the edge of bed. They kissed with dry lips.

Then she was shaking. Her bare breasts were close to his chest. She was Tres DeLuca, taller and bustier than most of the girls in her class. She was Tres DeLuca, who believed in God and cherished the saints though she quit going to confession. Once, on her mother’s nightstand, she’d found a paperback with the picture of a woman on the cover, head thrown back, mouth open as if for snowflakes. Thumbing through the book, in search of her mother’s spirit or soul, she found a number of troubling passages, worst among which was: She held up her breasts for him to kiss. She had no words then for the disgust she had felt—she was eight or nine—at what impelled the woman. “Sick” was her label on the mental box where she stashed the unspeakable image, of a woman offering up her breasts for inspection. Breasts large enough to overflow her hands.

But Tres was in high school now, on a bed with a boy. She touched his arm, the bristle of the little hairs. She put her lips to the side of his nose, then the place where his ear began, proto kisses, quasi offerings. It was new but not strange. Natural. His hand slid from her back to her side to the periphery of one of her breasts, then retreated to the more public skin over her rib cage. Her back arched involuntarily. Their mouths came together, tongues hesitant, almost apologetic. Is this nice? Do you like this?

By now her mind had stilled. She thanked God for her body, every pound of it. Their hips pressed together, their cotton-covered groins. The pleasuring pain between her legs, the lines from the book, the words on the phone from last night, which she cannot expunge, nor the voice of her father saying, “I want to be inside you.” Mom was in Connor’s room, reading aloud; she could hear her voice, which made it worse. She had felt sick, she wanted to gag at the declaration that was almost a plea, its preening self-abasement. But now it thrills her. Her skin feels like petals and electricity. Please, she cries, please, in a voice made almost entirely of breath, with no idea what she’s pleading for or against as she hurtles toward something she dreads and wants in almost equal proportions.

She felt his fingers inside her when they were already gone. “You’re so wet,” he murmured. Was it a good or a bad thing? I want to be inside you. The words passed through her mind on their way to someone who might be herself.

But now, suddenly, his body was slack. Still warm against her skin, it had been vacated. A single word stirred within her, crabbed, abased, bereft. What?

He got out of bed, and her eyes followed him. “I’m sorry,” he said.

If she were an extroverted, unself-conscious type of person she would have opened her mouth and let out whatever wanted to emerge. RRRhraaagh. Or Aaarchhhhlrch, like someone coughing up phlegm. Instead, she burrowed deeper into Mr. Miller’s bedcovers, dimly aware of Robby’s body as it disappeared into his pants and shirt. After he left, she dressed and remade the bed. The radio was still on in the living room, the closing notes of “Blowing in the Wind.” Then news.

It’s a zoo inside the Amphitheatre where the Democrats are trying their best to find someone to win them the November election. And it’s a literal zoo here in Grant Park, where the Yippie candidate “Pigasus,” a live 150-pound pig, is likewise campaigning, with enthusiastic support from the throng of visitors. Sadly, though, out on nearby Michigan Avenue fighting continues between the police and protesters. Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale has advised the public to defend themselves from police by any means necessary. Mayor Daley’s widely reported remark may characterize the situation: “The police aren’t here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.” This is Ralph Donleavy reporting live from Grant Park, where the sweet voices of Peter, Paul, and Mary are trying to calm things down. Go, Mary!

They left the building together, there being no other recourse, into a world that had changed. Instead of the popcorn smell a fishy breeze from the lake mixed with the inland odors of gas and exhaust. Across the street, two men walked side by side, not touching but as if their vital energy came from the same source. Robby watched them and Tres watched him watch. She didn’t want his or anyone’s eyes on her. She felt violated although she hadn’t been. Abandoned although she hadn’t been. Even thin, she thought, she would be ugly.

They moved with no destination but away, side by side in strained, self-ashamed silence. The sky was a clear, cloudless blue but they didn’t look up. They were drawn toward the underside of bridges, to the dense shade of grimy buildings, though it was cool now Only when they reached the open space of the river did a partial awareness of life outside themselves return. Turning south onto Columbus, they were met with vague human sounds like a low-hanging cloud, which clarified into music and voices as they crossed a bridge. Two more blocks and they had arrived at Grant Park and what seemed an enormous party.

People moved about, stopping to chat, eat, drink, then moving off, their faces alight with something. Some sat or lay on blankets or the bare ground, mostly in groups, calling occasionally to a passerby. Signs were propped against trees:

END THE WAR IN CHICAGO. SEND THE COPS HOME.

CLEAN FOR GENE!

BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL

These were the hippies, the yippies, kids from California and New York and downstate Illinois who had converged on Chicago to oppose the bad war. Some were dressed in bright rags, others in clothing that could have come from Marshall Field’s. There was long and short hair, shiny clean and dirty straggly hair, and beards, beads, bandannas. Tres’s outfit had friends here. From somewhere nearby a woman declared that she hated Gene McCarthy as much as Lyndon Johnson. In the shade of close-growing trees it looked like people were fucking under a blanket. She and Robby walked shyly, carefully, trying not to step on anyone, ears on alert for whatever they might need to know to safely arrive where they were going. To the heart or head of this unknown body, its energy source.

They stopped at the band shell, where on a long-ago Fourth of July Tres’s family came to hear “The 1812 Overture” with authentic-sounding cannon fire. Connor, then a baby, wouldn’t stop crying. On stage now a young woman in a gauzy shirt was playing a mandolin. Below, a man in wire-rimmed glasses like John Lennon’s toasted marshmallows over a small camp stove. The smell of sugar made their mouths water, but they sat some yards off, facing away, not wanting to beg. Tres thought about the pounds she would lose if she ate nothing else today. How many calories were in a glass of vodka?

She was trying not to think of food or how close but impossibly distant Robby was from her, when the man in the glasses approached with his flaming marshmallows. He blew them out with a host’s flourish, stuck them with chocolate between two graham crackers like a sandwich, broke it in half. “Land of plenty,” he said, handing a part to each. “There’s more where that came from.”

Tres tried to eat slowly, tasting the many kinds of sweetness that combined with the caramelized ash, then her hands shoved it all into her mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Happy or sad, who knew. “It’s that bad?” said the guy. “Are you okay?” said the young woman beside him, who was crocheting something that covered her lap. Tres nodded no and yes and received another serving. No, yes, the right answers, since nothing in the world had ever tasted so good.

By now the four had scooted into a conversational knot. The woman, Elise, was ultra-thin with red hair in braids like Pippi Longstocking. The man, David, looked more handsome than Elise was pretty (Tres quashed the petty thought). They went to UC. They were in bed this morning deciding what to study before they went out to see the new Godard film when it occurred to them simultaneously that they were elitist shits! “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem, right?” said David, words that found welcome in Tres’s brain. The violence was real; they had seen it here. Kids thrown into vans like sacks of potatoes. Some clubbed, repeatedly. He touched Elise’s hand. They had breathed tear gas, which was worse than you’d think. Not that it mattered in light of Vietnam.

The couple was easy to talk to. They knew about the boy murdered on Wells Street, Dean Johnson, a Sioux Indian, come in from South Dakota. Robby asked no questions, but he listened with more respect than he generally gave to strangers. They decried the cops, then tried to fathom the mental workings of cops. Was it anger that made them brutes or simple compliance with authority (the crazy mayor said, Shoot to kill), or did they believe in their work? Of course they needed their jobs. At one point a man of fifty or so lurched over, someone Tres’s mother would have pretended not to see. He sat down, reeking of booze, and he too got a treat. “You’re good kids,” he said. “I don’t care what they say.”

And now Tres loved this place, this time, these people. Others joined their group and David handed out more coffee. An American flag flapped paternally from a nearby flagpole. Every once in a while, a group of uniformed police would march through the seated clusters, faceless in riot helmets, but after a pulse of unease the conversations went on. There were bad rumors: four protesters seriously injured. And funny ones: Abby Hoffman arrested for walking around with the word FUCK on his forehead. There were practical questions: When arrested, was it better to go quietly, hoping not to be injured, or fight, or play dead and make them carry you away? “We have to resist,” Elise said, jabbing the air with her crochet hook. David didn’t disagree but put protective hands to his skull.

"A pre-med can’t afford brain damage!"

Some people laughed, uneasily.

“Still, we have to ask ourselves,” said Elise, “what is worth dying for?”

Robby, silent till now, suddenly raised his hand like a good student. “I can answer that.” When faces turned to him, he turned to her with his beautiful eyes wide open. “Tres,” he said. “Terese DeLuca, my best friend on earth. I would die for her.” He spoke lightly but sounded sincere. Folks smiled approval. But her face had gone hot. That isn't necessary, she wanted to say. Snippily. It didn't come close to what she wanted.

Still, as talk went on, Tres had more to consider in Elise’s question. The idea of dying for something. Laying down one's life. The idea, those very words had made her hair stand on end. In church she had prayed for the courage to sacrifice herself, like St. Agatha of Sicily who, for the glory of Jesus Christ, had suffered her breasts to be cut off, a torture Tres had tried to imagine herself withstanding even before she grew breasts. She absolutely knew she couldn’t sacrifice herself to end the war in Vietnam, though she revered the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire. She was amassing the courage to confess her cowardice to these kind and intelligent people with the aim, finally, of overcoming it, when two policemen stopped in front of them.

“I’ll have to ask you for that,” one of them said to David. He meant David’s little camp stove, which sat on the ground under the percolator in which fresh coffee was bubbling.

She observed the man, who didn’t scare her. In Highland Park, when she was stopped for an illegal left turn, the cop had looked at her license and told her to be more careful next time. “It’s just coffee we’re making,” she said, smiling at the policeman with her—irresistible, it seemed—youth and innocence. Elise seconded her. Robby proffered a cup. “Do join us, kind sirs.”

The man raised his visor, but the face he showed had no expression, as if he were looking at them through fogged glass. “No grilling on city property except in designated areas.”

“It’s not a grill,” David said. “No briquettes, just propane, officer.” He set the percolator on the grass. He shut off the tiny stove.

“I won’t ask you twice.”

David demonstrated by passing his hand over the burner. “It’s off. No heat. I won’t use it again. Promise.” He unscrewed the burner from the small blue tank. He was holding the two harmless items up for inspection when the cop went for his stick.

Revved with coffee, Tres felt herself rising to the challenge that all her life, it seemed, she had prepared for. But before she could insert herself between David and the baton, the second cop grabbed his partner’s arm. “Cool it,” he said. He sounded sick at heart.

When the men were out of earshot Elise murmured, “There’s so much anger in the world.”

“Motherfuckers,” David said with a smile.

“Just shocking.” Rob waved a hand toward the nearby American flag. “In the shadow of democracy.”

“One guy was decent,” said Tres. “And look, they left us the coffee pot!”

She poured herself coffee, how she loved coffee, and her urge to take the world and all its creatures into herself. A boy walked by with a parrot on his shoulder. Helium balloons bobbed in the dusk sporting peace signs and Black Power fists. This was her place, these her people. The enemy wore a uniform, so you knew whom to hate, which left everyone else to be loved if you were so inclined.

Then from on high came the screech of an amplifier. A man in thick black glasses stood on the bandshell before the lectern. Talking ceased. Faces upturned. His head was bald but he had a thick black beard and mustache. He wore a suit jacket with jeans, both rumpled. In a sleepy growl he said he would read some poems. There were whistles and cheers, prolonged. Elise and David grinned at each other.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

A pause. Applause thundered.

America it’s them bad Russians.

Them Russians, them Russians, and them Chinamen.

Tres listened, uneasy, while Robby beside her couldn’t take his eyes off the stage. America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. “That was great,” she ventured, and he kissed her hand. I’m a fraud, she thought.

Speakers followed whose aims were clearer. A guy with a headband and black braids described confronting the New York City police with bags full of slaughterhouse blood. When a cop raised his club, he and his pals broke the bags over their own heads. “It pours out and they totally freak!” Someone else took the mic and made an announcement: Rennie Davis was in the hospital. He had been beaten unconscious.

The gravitas and horror of the event swelled with people’s reactions. Elise was weeping. Someone yelled, “Bomb the Pentagon!” The clamor rose. Waves of fury looking for direction. Fuck the whole stupid country. Across the grass a skinny boy was climbing the pole toward the American flag. From the stage came Om. Om. Om. Then the boy was gone and so was the flag, and another flag was going up, white smeared with crimson. Tres and Robby felt for each other’s hands.

Things were happening now too fast for thinking. Elise and David were gone. A troop of police in gas masks were pushing toward the flagpole to chants of “Sieg Heil!” Someone yelled, “Stick those guns up your ass!” Someone else: “See how mad they get when you fuck with their flag!” Eggs were thrown. Water balloons spewed red and black. People were coughing.

Tear gas burns. That was new information. She and Robby needed air, but they were stuck in a crowd that swayed back and forth but didn’t go anywhere. They held on to each other, trying not to fall. From the stage someone urged battle in the streets. “Keep your head down!” said a voice near her ear. Chanting rose and fell: The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching. Occasionally a bullhorn pierced the din:

“We’re marching on the Amphitheatre.”

“Everybody sit down!”

“It’s time to leave the park. Exit in small groups.”

“Be cool! Await instruction.”

The air was the golden blue of late afternoon, but Tres couldn’t see. Eyes burning, nose streaming, she kept her head down and held tight to Robby’s hand, and after an indeterminate span of steady pushing in a single direction they were out on the street. But it was bad there in a different way. Kids were trying to overturn a police car. Others were being clobbered. Someone shot photos till his camera was yanked away and smashed. He held up the pieces for all to see. A Black man in a white shirt and tie was trying to organize people. “Stay together,” he said into a bullhorn. “Hold the line!”

Someone yelled, “Get these fuckers off the street.”

Which fuckers? said Tres to herself.

Then the bullhorn was sailing. The man in the shirt tottered, trying to keep his feet while a cop laid into him. "Stop! He didn't do anything!" Tres couldn't hear her own voice. Where was Robby? Then she saw Robby with his trademark smile and the bullhorn in his hands. "Stay together! Hold the line!" he shouted. He was looking around for something, possibly the bullhorn's owner. Around them was a jam of people; hard to see what was happening. Then there was Robby on the qsphalt, trying to turn onto his stomach while a baton wielded blows. On his back; his precious head. "Don't you dare hurt him!" she screamed at the policeman, whose baton was flailing too fast to catch hold of. "Somebody do something!" Was that blood from his ear?

Every once in a while and for no fathomable reason, a person will break out of the character that seemed consigned from birth and do something unlikely. This is an insight Tres had once upon a time, and here it was again. Someone mocks you, and although it isn’t the first assault on the fragile shell of your self-love, a pair of atoms conjoin on the sun, a bolt of helium flares, a couple of neurons realign in your brain, and instead of dissolving in tears, your fingers curl into claws at the sight of the mean, pretty face of the girl at whose house you’d always wanted to sleep over. Without thinking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Tres pulled at the kicker’s arm. He shook her off, not roughly. “Watch it, girlie.” He bent forward to recommence. She felt an ineluctable, blind propulsion. What an early Christian, ecstatic in faith, might have felt in the coliseum as the lion charged.

Timing her jump for when the cop was bent over, she seized his collar while her foot found purchase on his holster belt. She was up on his back, her arms around his neck, legs around his waist. “Yee ha!” someone shouted. In support? The thought increased her strength. The cop bucked, then tried to unpeel her; she yanked back on his helmet. “Jesus Christ!” He gagged, then again took the Lord’s name in vain. A venial sin. She almost laughed. There were things worth dying for. She tightened her legs as to a horse, while her hands pulled so hard on his helmet he staggered back. Yee ha! She was riding piggyback. Riding a pig!

Then her blouse ripped, or her skirt, and she was lying on the street, under arrest, handcuffed, lugged to a van. Robby, a miracle, was already in there. “He said he’d die for me,” she told the cop hoisting her aboard. Her sleeve was ripped; her blouse hung from one shoulder. Robby smiled welcome. “You look kind of sexy!” But before she could respond—she had no idea how to respond and her arm was starting to hurt, a lot--he said, “Joke!”

And what could she say to that? When there was blood on his neck?

That night hippies and yippies would march to the Amphitheatre with plans to change the course of history. The kids from Highland Park would ride to the police station, from where Tres would call her parents, who took her to the hospital and spent their rage on the police who’d handcuff a girl with an obviously broken arm (“It’s just my wrist, Mom,” Tres would say as the cast was applied).

Months later, without a word from Tres, her mother would discover her husband’s affair and surprise everyone and herself by divorcing him, though none of their friends were divorced. She promised Tres to be a better mom than she had been a wife, and it turned out to be true, though the bar, Tres thought, was kind of low. Robby would tell her what he had dumbly confessed to Scully, on account of which Scully requested another doubles partner, to which Gallagher acceded when he learned why although Scully had sworn not to tell anyone. Tres, of course, would tell no one, because she loved Robby although he didn’t want from her what she wanted from him and never would.

But so? Once upon a time in Chicago as the sky darkened and humanity churned she rode a bad cop, hard like a jockey. The cop, his broad back between her thighs. And she, trembling on the brink of something so much larger than herself.

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