Hearts in Atlantis(155)
You know you would have, he thinks dully. You do penance as much for what you were spared as for what you actually did. Don't you?
Here's Carol Gerber in her graduation gown; Spring 1966, it's marked. On the next page is a news clipping from the Harwich Journal marked Fall 1966. The accompanying picture is her again, but this version of Carol seems a million years removed from the young lady in the graduation gown, the young lady with the diploma in her hand, the white pumps on her feet, and her eyes demurely downcast. This girl is fiery and smiling, these eyes look straight into the camera. She seems unaware of the blood coursing down her left cheek. She is flashing the peace sign. This girl is on her way to Danbury already, this girl has got her Danbury dancing shoes on. People died in Danbury, the guts flew, baby, and Willie does not doubt that he is partly responsible. He touches the fiery smiling bleeding girl with her sign that says STOP THE MURDER (only instead of stopping it she became a part of it) and knows that in the end her face is the only one that matters, her face is the spirit of the age. 1960 is smoke; here is fire. Here is Death with blood on her cheek and a smile on her lips and a sign in her hand. Here is that good old Danbury dementia.
The next clipping is the entire front page of the Danbury paper. He has folded it three times so it will fit in the book. The biggest of four photos shows a screaming woman standing in the middle of a street and holding up her bloody hands. Behind her is a brick building which has been cracked open like an egg. Summer 1970, he has written beside it.
6 DEAD, 14 INJURED IN DANBURY BOMB ATTACK
Radical Group Claims Responsibility
'No One Meant to Be Hurt,' Female Caller Tells Police
The group - Militant Students for Peace, they called themselves - planted the bomb in a lecture hall on the Danbury UConn campus. On the day of the explosion, Coleman Chemicals was holding job interviews there between ten A.M. and four P.M. The bomb was apparently supposed to go off at six in the morning, when the building was empty. It failed to do so. At eight o'clock, then again at nine, someone (presumably someone from the MSP) called Campus Security and reported the presence of a bomb in the first-floor lecture hall. There were cursory searches and no evacuation. 'This was our eighty-third bomb-threat of the year,' an unidentified Campus Security officer was quoted as saying. No bomb was found, although the MSP later claimed vehemently that the exact location - the air-conditioning duct on the left side of the hall - had been given. There was evidence (persuasive evidence to Willie Shearman if to no one else) that at quarter past noon, while the job interviews were in recess for lunch, a young woman made an effort - at considerable risk to her own life and limb - to retrieve the UXB herself. She spent perhaps ten minutes in the then-vacant lecture hall before being led away, protesting, by a young man with long black hair. The janitor who saw them later identified the man as Raymond Fiegler, head of the MSP. He identified the young woman as Carol Gerber.
At ten minutes to two that afternoon, the bomb finally went off. Gobless the living; gobless the dead.
Willie turns the page. Here is a headline from the Oklahoma City Oklahoman. April of 1971.
3 RADICALS KILLED IN ROADBLOCK SHOOTOUT
'Big Fish' May Have Escaped by Minutes,
Says FBI SAC Thurman
The big fish were John and Sally McBride, Charlie 'Duck' Golden, the elusive Raymond Fiegler . . . and Carol. The remaining members of the MSP, in other words. The McBrides and Golden died in Los Angeles six months later, someone in the house still shooting and tossing grenades even as the place burned down. Neither Fiegler nor Carol was in the burned-out shell, but the police techs found large quantities of spilled blood which had been typed AB Positive. A rare blood-type. Carol Gerber's blood-type.
Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Not a day goes by that Willie doesn't ask himself this question.
He turns to the next page of the scrapbook, knowing he should stop, he should get home, Sharon will worry if he doesn't at least call (he will call, from downstairs he will call, she's right, he's very dependable), but he doesn't stop just yet.
The headline over the photo showing the charred skull of the house on Benefit Street is from the Los Angeles Times'.
3 OF 'DANBURY 12' DIE IN EAST L.A.
Police Speculate Murder-Suicide Pact
Only Fiegler, Cerber Unaccounted For
Except the cops believed Carol, at least, was dead. The piece made diat clear. At the time, Willie had also been convinced it was so. All that blood. Now, however . . .
Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Sometimes his heart whispers to him that the blood doesn't matter, that she got away from that small frame house long before the final acts of insanity were committed there. At other times he believes what the police believe - that she and Fiegler slipped away from the others only after the first shootout, before the house was surrounded; that she either died of wounds suffered in that shootout or was murdered by Fiegler because she was slowing him down. According to this scenario the fiery girl with the blood on her face and the sign in her hand is probably now just a bag of bones cooking in the desert someplace east of the sun and west of Tonopah.
Willie touches the photo of the burned-out house on Benefit Street . . . and suddenly a name comes to him, the name of the man who maybe stopped Dong Ha from becoming another My Lai or My Khe. Slocum. That was his name, all right. It's as if the blackened beams and broken windows have whispered it to him.
Willie closes the scrapbook and puts it away, feeling oddly at peace. He finishes squaring up what needs to be squared up in the offices of Midtown Heating and Cooling, then steps carefully through the trapdoor and finds his footing on top of the stepladder below. He takes the handle of his briefcase and pulls it through. He descends to the third step, then lowers the trapdoor into place and slides the ceiling panel back where it belongs.