The Nix(177)
Except she is carrying a weapon, which puts her in a whole other category. Girl faces just look different when they’re all violent like that.
Actually almost all the girls in the crowd are carrying weapons: two-by-fours, some with these evil-looking rusty nails sticking out of the swinging end; and rocks and chunks of pavement; and iron bars and bricks; and bags with unknown contents, but their guess? Shit and piss, plus menstrual blood. Gross. The TV says there’s rumors of radicals buying huge amounts of oven cleaner and ammonia, which sounds like bomb-making material even if the uncles are not a hundred percent sure of the chemistry of this. But if anyone would be carrying oven-cleaner explosives it would be one of these girls because, they figure, girls have routine access to such things.
CBS has cut away from old Cronkite for a moment and is just showing all this live and unedited. And most people tune in to CBS to hear old Cronkite deliver his assessment about things, but the uncles’ opinion about it? About not seeing Cronkite right now? They think good. The guy’s gotten a little soft lately, a little lefty too, and arrogant, all these puffed-up pronouncements from the top of Mount Journalism or something. They prefer their news from the source, undiluted.
Case in point: girls walking south in the middle of the street. This is action. This is news untouched. Especially now as a cop car rolls up and instead of dispersing like they ought to the girls actually attack the cop car! Jabbing at the siren with baseball bats! Breaking the windows with rocks! And the poor cop leaps out the other side of the car and holy cow is that boy running! And even though it’s only girls he’s running from there’s like a hundred of them and they mean business. Then the girls all gather on the car and it looks like a bunch of ants surrounding a beetle ready to devour it. And the leader horse-faced girl yells Heave-ho! and they actually tip over the police car! It’s the most amazing thing the uncles have ever seen! And the girls all cheer at their job well done and then continue marching and chanting and the cop car’s siren is still blowing but instead of at full volume it’s like a demoralized and sad siren sound. It moans and whines in this low, pitiful way. It sounds like an electronic toy whose batteries are just about dead.
And now girls are yelling after the cop, yelling “Here piggy piggy! Oink, oink! Soo-ee!” And this is about the best thing the uncles have seen on television in a month.
9
THE CONRAD HILTON HOTEL is nowhere near the convention. The Democratic National Convention will happen at the International Amphitheater, down on the grounds of the Union Stock Yards, about five miles south of here. But the amphitheater is completely inaccessible: A barbed-wire fence surrounds it; National Guard troops patrol the grounds; every manhole cover has been tarred shut; roadblocks at every intersection; even airplanes are banned from flying over it. Once the delegates are inside the amphitheater, there would be no reaching them. Hence the protest at the Hilton, where all the delegates are staying.
Plus there’s the matter of the smell.
It’s all Hubert Humphrey can think about. His staff is right now trying to tell him how the peace-plank debate will go, but it’s like every time he turns his head he can smell it again.
Whose idea was it anyway to hold a convention next to a slaughterhouse?
He could sense them, smell them, hear them, the poor animals huddled and dying hundreds per hour to feed a prosperous nation. Trucked in as infants, trucked out as parts. He could smell the hogs insane with fear, the hogs hanging from hooks, their stomachs opened in cascades of blood and pig barf. The smell of bright raw ammonia used to clean the addled floors. Creatures in their death-fear releasing cries and stink glands, a terror both audible and olfactible. The chemical breath of a million aborted animal screams, aromatized and blooming into the atmosphere, a sour, meaty vapor.
The perfume of slaughter is at once nauseating and fascinating. The way the body is tuned to another body’s loss.
A pile of manure that rose even above the barbed-wire fences, fifteen feet tall, dropped tepee-shaped in a fit of copromania, sitting raw in the sun and cooking. Like some kind of ancient evil bubbling up out of the Pleistocene. An organic mud that tanged the air and locked itself in fabric and hair.
“What kind of abomination is that?” Triple H asked, pointing at the shit cone. His security men laughed. They were the sons of farmers; he was the son of a pharmacist. His only encounter with this kind of biology came after it was processed and pulverized. He wanted to stuff his nose in his own armpit. The smell was more like a weight than a gas. It felt like the whole moral rot of the world taking shape and form right here, in Chicago.
“Somebody light a match!” said one of the agents.
The smell is on him still. The maid says the washroom is ready. Thank god. At this point a shower is more analgesic than anything else.
10
FAYE IS IN JAIL roughly nine hours before the ghost appears.
She is kneeling, hands clasped, facing the far wall where shadows flicker by, and she asks God for help. Says she’ll do anything, anything at all. Please, she says, rocking, whatever you want. And she does this until she feels dizzy and she begs her body to let her sleep, but when she closes her eyes she feels like one big long plucked guitar string, all shaky and furious. And so it’s during this in-between state of being too exhausted to stay awake but too agitated to fall asleep that the ghost appears to her. She opens her eyes and senses a presence nearby and looks around and sees, on the far wall, illuminated by the window’s dull blue light, this creature.