The woman loving and feeling my care those days was LaVerne. And while I generally made a point of not calling her at work, sometimes an exception shouldered its way in.
I knew her schedule pretty well by then, and got her at the third place I tried. The bartender said just a minute and set the phone down. I listened to what sounded like at least three distinct parties going on in the distance.
“Lewis! Where are you? Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I know what happened last night. Someone said they thought the police still had you. You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah. They let me go a few hours ago, thanks to a friend.”
“Friend?”
“Tell you when I see you. Right now I’m about as dragged out as a man can get.”
“So you’re at home?”
“Home and heading for Dreamland. How’s work?”
“Slow.”
“Doesn’t sound slow.”
“Well. Mostly drinkers. You know. Things’ll pick up once lunch’s over.”
“Come by after while?”
“If I do, honey, it’s going to be real late.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Don’t wait up for me.”
“Real funny, Verne.”
I heard a sharp crack, like a shot, in the background. For a moment, everything at that end grew quiet.
“Verne: you okay?”
“I’m fine. Sal just broke his baseball bat across some guy’s head that was getting out of hand.”
I knew where she was and had to wonder what constituted getting out of hand there. A narrow line, at best. The ruckus had already started up again, louder than before.
“You going to be okay there?”
“I don’t know. Hold on, let me check.”
She turned away, said something, was back.
“We’re in luck, Lew. Sal says it’s okay, he has another bat.”
We laughed, said good-bye and hung up. I poured half a jelly glass of bourbon from a gallon of K amp;B. Dragged a chair over by the window and sat with my feet on the sill. The huge old oak tree out there in the yard had been around at least a hundred years. It had seen grand buildings and neighborhoods come and go, seen the city under rule of three different nations. Now it was dying. Birds avoided it. If you touched it, chunks of dry, weightless wood came away, crumbling into your hand, smelling of soil. Soon a hurricane or just a strong wind, or eventually nothing much at all, would bring it crashing down.
I was reading a lot of science fiction back then. I’d drop by a newsstand, pick up a half dozen books and read them all in a couple of days. As that morning edged over into afternoon, I sat by the window sipping bourbon and looking out at the ancient, doomed oak. The big house’s back door creaked open and shut as workers hurried home for lunch, students to and from classes. And I found myself thinking about a book I’d read not long ago. Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell.
Burrowing in at the lowest levels, a lone man infiltrates a distant world’s corrupt society. Through various ruses, surfacing momentarily here and there-an irritant, a catalyst, a wasp-he brings about discord in the governed and invisibly guides them toward revolution.
That seemed a fairly constant theme in the science fiction I read. One man would know what was right, and in the face of great opposition-imprisonment, exile, threats of death, reconditioning-he would change the world. No one seemed to notice that every time one of these far-flung worlds changed, it changed to the very one we were living in. Same values, same taboos, same stratifications.
Americans once believed a single man might change the world. That was what our frontier myths, our stories about rugged individualists, our rough-edged heroes, cowboys, private eyes, were all about. America believed it could change the world. Believed this was its destiny.
Now we were ass over head in a war no one could win and after twenty years of waiting for the Big Red Boogie Man to gobble us up at any moment, we’d begun destroying ourselves instead.
No one believed anymore that a single man could change things. Maybe, just maybe, in mass they could. Civil-rights marchers. NAACP, SNCC, SDS. Panthers, Muslims, the Black Hand.
No.
No, I was wrong.
At least one American still truly believed that a single man might change the world.
Last night he had waited in darkness on a roof-for how long? And when Esme Dupuy and I walked out into the street, he had expressed that belief, given it substance, in sudden action.