1968.

"Yourson"s a f.u.c.king queer!" He roared, stabbing his finger toward Spider as he rose in sodden wrath.

"You don"t even know what "blow" means, do you?"

Spider was wiping bourbon sting from his eyes. "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"Your own doctor said so! He said he was trying to cure you."

"Oh, that. Folsom"s not a doctor. And he admitted he was-"

"By G.o.d you don"t have to be a doctor to tell a queer!"

Spider turned to his mother. She was staring at both of them with dumb astonishment. "It"s not true, Mother."

"Has he been on a date since he got home? Has he evenlooked at a girl?"

She shook her head slowly. "No.""Ihave. I tried to find Beverly."

"She ran away," his mother said, voice shaking. "Her father says she ran away to California with a hippy, a ho-, a h.o.m.o hippy."

"You see? Yousee?"

"If he"s a h.o.m.o," Spider said, "why is he interested in Beverly?"

"Why don"tyou tellme," his father said. "I don"t know a f.u.c.king thing about that kind of. thing."

He looked at his father and wondered why he didn"t feel more anger. He didn"t feel fear or hate or much of anything. Just tiredness, and frustration. Probably the Valium. "Dad, why don"t we talk in the morning?

You"re tired and you"ve had too much to drink."

"You can"t tell me how much to drink."

"I guess not." Spider stood up and headed for the door. "I"ll see you both later."

He was wrong.

Life is but a dream Spider stopped at the light where East-West Highway crosses Wisconsin, a long light, and a man walked by and looked into the car at him. His face was melted, scar tissue from a terrible burn.

And suddenly Spider was not in the car. He was back in the cold white room with the smells, and today, his next-to-last day, there was a new smell, like roasted pork.

It was already out of the body bag, lying on its side on the porcelain table. The image of a human being crudely sculpted out of carbon char.

"Saved this one for you, John," the black man said, but his voice was serious and strained. "You never got a napalm before. Crispy critter."

"One of ours?"

"Uh huh. Air strike, Fang said, guy was in a LP cut off from the rest of the unit. You wanta check his dog tags?"

Spider moved toward the corpse as if through thick glue. Its mouth was open impossibly wide. Even the tongue was burned, blistered. The face was not a face. There were cheekbones and holes that had been eyes and two slits marking where the nose had been and one melted ear. The black stumps that had been arms were drawn togather across its chest and its knees were pulled up. All the clothes were burned off and it had the charred fossil of an erection.

The dogtag was warped by the heat, and oxidized. Spider bent it back into shape and sc.r.a.ped the crud off it with his thumbnail, and wiped the thumbnail on his trousers. When he tried to talk no sound came out.He coughed twice. "Ramble, John NMI. RA-three-seven-six-six-four-five-nine-eight."

"Stupid p.r.i.c.k joined up."

"Yeah. Baptist. Type A."

"See if there"s a unit designation on the body bag."

Spider bent over to look at the body bag and his knees buckled and he fainted dead away. Almost a year later, the incident triggered a chorus of automobile horns.

The great white hope Robert F. Kennedy had run John F. Kennedy"s presidential campaign, and as a reward for that success was appointed to the office of attorney general at the age of thirty-five. After his brother was killed, RFK sought the vice-presidential nomination in 1964. Lyndon Johnson said no, so RFK ran for a Senate seat in New York and won. He bided his time. In 1967 and early 1968, Johnson"s popularity slid and then, after Tet, nosedived. In mid-March, six weeks after Tet, "Bobby" threw his hat in the ring.

Like a lot of Americans of her generation, Beverly was hypnotized by Bobby"s youthful energy and Brahmin charm, and saw in them the possibility of reclaiming JFK"s Camelot. Never mind that much of the world had seen JFK as a saber-rattling bully, threatening nuclear war over Cuba and sending American troops to support a corrupt regime in Vietnam; never mind that RFK had cut his political teeth on Joe McCarthy"s vicious Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Both men had personal magnetism and liberal credentials that overshadowed not-so-liberal actions.

It was another McCarthy, Eugene, who had Lee"s vote. "Clean Gene" was going to fire Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the Selective Sendee"s General Hershey, and J. Edgar Hoover. (Like both Kennedys, McCarthy"s record was not in harmony with his rhetoric: he had voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that put us into Vietnam, and voted in favor of every Vietnam war appropriation bill.) McCarthy, much more than Kennedy, pushed Johnson into the decision not to run in 1968. The President was humiliated by the Wisconsin primary, which went to McCarthy, 57 to 36 percent. Right after that, LBJ gave the famous 31 March television speech that ended, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."

Bobby moved in for the kill. He was less worried about McCarthy, whom he a.s.sessed as a fringe protest candidate, than he was about Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was shedding his liberal principles fast, in order to secure the party"s centrist nomination. Bobby was generous in his public praise for LBJ"s wisdom and magnanimity; his great achievements for racial harmony and economic opportunity-forgetting the beware-the-warmonger rhetoric of previous months-but Johnson was unmoved. He hadn"t liked Bobby in 1964, and he certainly had nothing to gain by appearing to like him now. LBJ would endorse his Vice President as the lesser of two evils, and the Democratic Party machine would fall in behind him.

Kennedy campaigned hard through April, and in early May won his first primary victory, Indiana, with almost twice as many votes as McCarthy. He won handily again in mid-May, in Nebraska, but at the end of the month was edged out in liberal Oregon, McCarthy taking 45 percent to his 39.

California would be the make-or-break test, with its large liberal population and crucial 174 convention delegates. Both men moved toward Los Angeles for the showdown.Moving in, moving out Spider parked the car more or less legally and went uphill to the Language Building, where he"d seen a bulletin board full of notices of apartments and rooms to rent. There was a furnished attic room for $65 that was only a few blocks from the doughnut place. He called from a pay phone and a woman with a dry whispery voice said it was still available.

It actually looked better than he had expected. It was smaller than his room at home, but it was clean and had an interesting mix of Salvation Army furniture. The man who showed him the room was not your ideal landlord, though; old and deaf and querulous. He asked if Spider were one of those "hipsters."

When Spider said no, he"d just gotten out of the army, the man was monumentally unimpressed. He"d been Field Artillery in double-you-double-you-One, now that was awar. Spider agreed with him.

No pets, no girls, no parties. Mrs. Remington will fix you one egg and toast in the morning; if you want more than that you have to get it somewhere else. Laundromat two blocks away, but Mrs. Remington will do your sheets every Sat.u.r.day for an extra two dollars a month. No food stored in your room but you can have the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.

Spider looked at the money he had left over after the deposit and realized he would have to budget it. He hadn"t asked the guy at the doughnut shop how long it would be until he got paid. Figure a couple of weeks, anyhow. There was a place in Riverside where he could get Budweiser in returnables for $1.99 a case. Otherwise, he could live on peanut-b.u.t.ter-and-pickle sandwiches and canned beans. It wouldn"t be any worse than his mother"s home cooking.

He went out and stocked up and filled the bottom of the refrigerator with beer and pickles and cans of tuna fish that had been on sale. He decided to wait a day before going back home, at least a day. Give his dad some time to cool off. Or leave.

The Remingtons had an old balloon-tire bicycle in the garage that he could use. He pumped up the tires and oiled it and set out squeakily to explore the neighborhood. Mostly quiet and residential. He came to a park and watched some girls play softball for a while. They were fun to look at but probably too young for him, and anyhow none expressed any interest. They were absorbed in the game, awkwardly intense, but the worst of them could probably outhit and outpitch Spider. He could probably outrun them, but none of them chased him.

A few blocks away, he found a large ramshackle used-book store. They had unbelievable deals on old science fiction magazines and paperbacks, two for a quarter. He reevaluated his budget and dropped four dollars. That was about as much literature as the bicycle"s front basket could manage.

He went back to his new home and sat on the porch drinking beer and readingMercenary, a Mack Reynolds novel about a future where wars were fought by corporations and televised as entertainment.

That didn"t seem so far-fetched. Parts of the book made him nervous, so he took an extra Valium. He fell asleep in the last chapter and dozed until dark, his b.u.t.t growing numb and cold on the porch swing.

He woke up famished and polished off a can of tuna with two slices of bread and a dill pickle. He read in bed for a while and then turned off the light and worried about tomorrow until he fell asleep.

His father"s car was gone when he pulled into the driveway in the morning. He peeked in the garage and saw his mother"s car was gone, too. He let himself into the quiet house.

He got a beer out of the refrigerator and walked around the rooms, remembering. They had moved herewhen he was six; nothing earlier was actually real to him.

For some reason it was easier to remember things, walking through alone. He didn"t have to reconcile his memory of his mother, or his father, with what they were now. The memories were mostly-good.

He found three liquor boxes in the garage and filled them up with books. He opened the biology book and got an insistent erection from thePlayboy pictures, but decided not to do anything about it until he got to his new place, a sort of christening.

He swaddled the microscope in clothes and packed it with the slide collection, but decided against hauling the telescope over. It would take up an awful lot of room, and he wouldn"t be able to use it anyhow, until he got better. The memory of that night still spooked him. He took all the astronomy books, though, and the star charts.

He looked at the chart of the Southern skies and had to sit down on the bed. That terrible night with the guy moaning kill me, kill me, just shoot me in the head. His legs and d.i.c.k blown off, or was it just his d.i.c.k. Bang c.o.c.k. And then his father thinking he was talking about blowing a guy. Sucking someone"s d.i.c.k, ugh. Thanks a lot, Captain My Captain. Thanks for everything.

He filled a suitcase with school clothes and threw in a bathing suit and his gym shorts and jockstrap from high school. The catalog said he had to take swimming and two other gym courses to graduate. Maybe swimming was coed; that would be all right.

At that moment he realized it wasn"t Beverly he missed, not Beverly specifically. He just desperately needed a girl, any girl, to talk to, to look at. G.o.d, to hold her softness and smell her hair. He remembered that like a blow.

He wasn"t crying but his eyes were leaking, and his nose filled up.

He went down to the kitchen to get a paper towel. His mother"s bourbon bottle was there and he poured half a tumbler full. He added a couple of ice cubes but it wasn"t even cool when he choked it all down, medicine drinking. Just like dear old Dad. He shouted at the empty kitchen and loaded up his car and drove slowly, grimly, back to College Park.

A good man is easy to lose Lee"s Thing From Detroit had a flat tire on the way to the Amba.s.sador Hotel, so they showed up for the Kennedy party an hour late. Beverly was in a rotten and contentious mood anyhow, since McCarthy had won Oregon the week before, and Lee was doing a bad job of hiding his pleasure at that. He dropped her at the hotel and went off in search of a free parking place. He"d find a place to wash up from changing the tire and meet her upstairs.

The Emba.s.sy Room, where Kennedy would make his victory or concession speech, was packed solid; a brace of firemen blocking the door sent her downstairs to the overflow area, the Amba.s.sador Ballroom.

There was no point in getting p.i.s.sed off at the firemen, and the flat tire actually wasn"t Lee"s fault, and McCarthy wasn"t such a bad man. But she really felt like biting somebody. She went into the ladies" room instead, and sat in a stall for ten minutes, reading aCosmo someone had left behind.

At last the ballroom wasn"t so crowded. Up in the Emba.s.sy Room, she would have had to wait for hours in the crowd crush, and probably never actually get close to Kennedy. She"d probably see him better onthe TV monitors here.

Volunteers were hurriedly setting up punch bowls and tubs of soft drinks. Beverly volunteered to join the bucket brigade for ice. She went upstairs to the ice machine five times, and each time she went by a row of three stainless-steel warming tables under a sign that said the once and future king. Tomorrow she would see them in a newspaper photograph and faint dead away.

Lee showed up tired but determined to be friendly, and they commandeered a table with eight chairs close to one of the monitors. The table filled up fast and they chatted with the others while the TV moved from network to network. Lee didn"t mention his own heretical affiliation; on his grease-smudged shirt he wore a couple of rfk b.u.t.tons as well as the volunteer guest badge.

The punch was slightly spiked and one of the volunteers came up with a bottle of vodka to help it along, so the wait wasn"t too onerous. The results should have been in before ten, but Los Angeles County, with 43 percent of the votes, was having computer trouble. One by one the networks predicted a Kennedy win.

They heard the cheering from upstairs first, and then the TV screens all switched to the Emba.s.sy Room.

Kennedy gave a rather long, rambling victory speech, thanking everybody under the sun, including Eugene McCarthy. His last words were "Now on to Chicago and let"s win there."

Lee wanted to get out fast and beat the crowd. That was all right with Beverly; it was past her bedtime and the vodka was making her heavy-lidded in spite of all the excitement.

The Thing was parked about ten minutes from the hotel. Beverly got to the bathroom before the line started and Lee hustled her out.

They were alone on the sidewalk, approaching the car, when a tan ambulance went screaming by. "Hope no one"s hurt," Beverly said, without logic.

There was no Zapruder film to doc.u.ment the a.s.sa.s.sination of Robert F. Kennedy; only a room full of eyewitnesses. Most of them agreed on one central fact: Sirhan Sirhan fired a pistol at RFK, and RFK fell mortally wounded.

Sirhan eventually was convicted of the crime. Investigators found a notebook that he had filled with weird stream-of-consciousness ravings, repeating "RFK must die." He sometimes acted quite sane, but was irrational often enough to make it seem convincing that the a.s.sa.s.sination had been a combination of obsessive planning and lunatic impulse.

There are two problems with that straightforward explanation. One is that Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy, but Kennedy was struck by three bullets fired frombehind him. Sirhan"s revolver held only eight bullets; either ten or thirteen were retrieved from the scene.

The fatal bullet was fired point-blank, less than one inch from Kennedy"s skull, behind the right ear.

Sirhan was never closer than eighteen inches. A bullet taken from his body was compared to one taken from a bystander wounded by Sirhan while people were attempting to disarm him, and two forensic examiners agreed that the bullets came from different weapons. (A 1975 review board was not as confident as the earlier examiners, saying that the two-weapon theory was a possibility, not a certainty.) Conspiracy buffs are quick to drag in the Mafia, since Kennedy had given a lot of grief to organized crime as attorney general. The previous month Jimmy Hoffa, serving time in a Pennsylvania federalprison, had been overheard discussing "a contract to kill Bob Kennedy." There are tenuous links between the Mob and Sirhan (racetrack acquaintances) and the Amba.s.sador Hotel (where racketeer Mickey Cohen had run a gambling operation in the 1940s) and Kennedy"s bodyguard Thane Eugene Cesar (vague "connections"), who was the only other armed person in the room.

Cesar carried a.38-caliber revolver, not a.22, which would seem to exonerate him. But several people reported seeing Cesar pull out a pistol and fire several times, supposedly at Sirhan, and no.38-caliber bullets were recovered from the scene. (Cesar did have a Harrington & Richardson nine-shot.22 pistol registered under his name, but he claimed to have sold it months before the a.s.sa.s.sination. Years later, a bill of sale surfaced datedSeptember 1968, three months after the deed; police tried to track the pistol down, but it had been stolen.) The odd resonances with RFK"s brother"s a.s.sa.s.sination can be taken two ways, of course. It could be that both men were murdered by a conspiracy involving organized crime. It could be that if you probe deeply enough into any murder that"s not a domestic affair, you"ll find oddities galore, including connections with criminals, some of them more or less organized.

Maybe our desire to see these a.s.sa.s.sinations as the work of large mysterious forces beyond our control is a way of denying the simple truth: in America, any nut case with the price of a gun obviously has a fair prospect of killing any public figure he dislikes.

That said, there are other strands of coincidence and malice to be added to the web that connects Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover. It was Kennedy who authorized Hoover"s snooping on King, that led to the taped evidence of adultery being sent to his wife. But Kennedy was of course on King"s side politically, and it was Kennedy who chartered the plane that transported King"s family and his body from Memphis to Atlanta. In a eulogy for King, Kennedy had the weirdly prophetic line "No one can be certain who next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed."

As noted earlier, James Earl Ray was apprehended in a theater-of-the-absurd confrontation with the customs people at London"s Heathrow-presenting two pa.s.sports with different names; trying to smuggle a concealed weapon aboard a plane-but Hoover asked the British authorities to keep it quiet. He delayed the news of Ray"s apprehension for a day so that King"s widow would be told of it during her attendance at Kennedy"s funeral.

One day on the job Spider bicycled through the morning darkness to the doughnut shop, peering intently at the pool of light thrown from a flashlight clipped to the handlebars. It had rained earlier and now the air was pleasantly heavy and cool. Crickets chirped back at his squeaking wheels. When he got to Route 1 he switched to the sidewalk, enduring the cracks and puddles rather than trust the night vision of truck drivers high on Benzedrine and coffee, trying to make New York before rush hour. Why didn"t they use the Beltway?

Speed traps, he supposed.

He got to the shop a few minutes before three. (On the other coast, Robert Kennedy was taking a short-cut through the hotel kitchen.) The bright fluorescents inside flooded the small parking lot with a ghostly glare. There weren"t any customers. The guy behind the cash register was squinting at a thick textbook and taking notes on a spiral pad. While Spider locked up the bike, a rattletrap van pulled into the lot and parked next to him. It dieseled, the engine coughing and sputtering after the driver turned it off. Spider could hear him pump the accelerator, grumbling in some foreign language. The engine stopped with a minor explosion and his boss got out."Early, that"s good." He shook Spider"s hand and ushered him into the shop. "Hey, Kerry, studyin" on company time."

Kerry looked up heavy-lidded. "So you want a doughnut?"

"Huh uh, You gotta stop bein" a student and be a teacher." The boss introduced them.

Kerry had been expecting him. "Yeah, that"s mainly why I"m going into grad school, stay out of Vietnam.

Hope it"ll be over in a couple of years."

"G.o.d knows. They stop f.u.c.kin" around in Paris and get down to business." Spider saw the boss wince.

"Sorry. Watch my language."

"Jus" when customers around. You got the Fryolater up?"

"I"d give it a few more minutes,"Kerry said. "Thermometer"s been running low, I mean high. It"ll say the oil"s hot enough but they won"t brown up."

"Well, show Spider the batter stuff. I gotta inventory and go down to the warehouse, shoulda done it yesterday."

"We just have enough four-ex for one more batch, maybe two."

"That"s what I figured; apples, too. Check everything out, I"ll be back by five."

Kerry took Spider back to the Mixing Station. It was not too challenging for a person who was able to read; there was a fifteen-step recipe taped to the mixer head. It took about ten minutes for Spider to go through the process for vanilla. He carried the heavy steel mixing bowl to a sideboard and started over with an empty one for "fudge." Kerry was a good mentor, supplying information when Spider needed it, but mainly letting him go through the steps on his own.

The doughnut gun was fun to learn, but Kerry guaranteed it would get old fast. You filled the cylinder up with batter and then fired it into the Fryolater"s tub of hot fat, firing close to the surface so the hot oil didn"t splash on you. One cylinder produced about twelve doughnuts. You refilled and emptied it fast and fried two dozen at a time. (Too many and the temperature of the oil would go down and make the doughnuts greasy. But you didn"t want to make too few, or you"d be standing by the Fryolater all morning.) The doughnuts floated. After they"d fried for a little less than two minutes, brown on one side, you turned them over with a long fork and let them go until that side was brown, maybe another minute.

Then you threaded them onto a cooling rod and racked them, and started over.

The hot oil made Spider nervous. He had been badly burned as a kid, trying to help his mother fry chicken. The back of his right hand was slick with scar tissue from the accident. The napalm memory was there, too.

Kerry studied while Spider did five racks. Then he initiated him into the mysteries of powdered sugar, which was pretty obvious; honey-dipped, which used no honey and weren"t dipped; and the panoply of combinations possible with sprinkles, coconut shreds, and chopped nuts, combined with glazes of chocolate, cherry, hard sauce, and b.u.t.terscotch. Spider ate three of his creations and thought they were great. Kerry went back to his books and ate half a ham sandwich.

Spider started the process over. They wanted to do all of the regular batter before they fried the fudgeones. His boss came back and approved of his new expertise, and manned the Fryolater while Spider and Kerry unloaded the van and stacked the boxes in the storage room.

This is how things happen. Spider was dragging, so he poured a cup of coffee to perk him up. He went to relieve his boss at the Fryolater. The boss finished turning the current batch and told Spider to give them a little extra time.

He studied the doughnuts turning lazily in the sizzling oil. He didn"t notice his boss go outside through the storage room and get into the van, parked right by the open window. When he tried to start the old thing, it backfired, one loud bark like a hand grenade. Spider"s whole body jerked in a spasm of hypervigilance, and the coffee cup sailed into the Fryolater. He just had time to throw up his hands to shield his face.

Spider staggered back from the explosion of boiling oil, knocking over a rack of doughnuts but staying upright himself, sagging back in agony against the wall. The left side of his face was badly burned: forehead, eyelid, cheek, and ear. But he didn"t notice. He was staring at his hands, watching angry blisters form on the palms and fingers and on his forearms halfway down to the elbows.