There it was. They'd built the house back. It was gray, and in need of painting. Other houses were crowded in around it, the structures jammed together with little respect for space and privacy. She knew that behind the houses were tiny yards squared off with fences, and a warren of alleys for the garbagemen. Oh yes, she knew this neighborhood very, very well.
'This is it,' she told Drummer in a reverential voice. 'This is where your mama was born.'
She remembered it: the first night of July 1972. The Storm Front was in that house, preparing its mission on the weeping lady. Gary Leister, a native New Yorker, had been renting the house under an alias. Lord Jack knew a dude in Bolivia who sent up cocaine in boxes of cigars, the smokes hollowed out and packed with blow. It was with two of these shipments that the Storm Front paid their black-market source in Newark for an assortment of automatic pistols, riot shotguns, hand grenades, plastic explosive, a dozen fresh sticks of dynamite, and a couple of Uzi submachine guns. The house, painted light green in those days, had been an arsenal from which the Storm Front stalked pigs, lawyers, and Manhattan businessmen whom they deemed cogs of the Mindfuck State. The Storm Fronters had kept themselves clean and quiet, holding down the volume of all music and cutting back on their pot smoking. The neighbors had thought that the kids who lived in the house at 1105 Elderman Street had been a strange mix of white, black, and Oriental, but this was the prime of 'All in the Family' and the Archie Bunkers of the world groused in their armchairs but minded their own business. The Storm Fronters had made a point of being friendly to the neighbors, of helping the older residents paint their houses and wash their cars. Mary had even earned some extra cash by baby-sitting for an Italian couple a street over. CinCin Omara, a mathematics major at Berkeley, had tutored a neighborhood kid in algebra. Sancho Clemenza, a Chicano poet who spoke four languages, had been a clerk at Carazella's grocery. James Xavier Toombs, who had killed his first pig when he was sixteen years old, had been a short-order cook at the Majestic Diner on Woodroan Avenue. The Storm Fronters had blended into the neighborhood, had covered themselves over with the camouflage of the workaday world, and no one had ever guessed that they planned murders and bombings in midnight sessions that left them all flying high on their sweetest drug: rage.
And then, on the early evening of July 1, Janette Snowden and Edward Fordyce had gone out to get pizza and backed into a pig car on the way home.
'No sweat, no sweat,' Edward had said as he and Janette had told the others after they'd gotten back with the cold pizzas. 'Everything's cool.'
'STUPID!' Lord Jack had shouted into Edward's gaunt, bearded face, coming up out of his chair like a panther. 'Stupid as shit, man! Why the fuck didn't you look where you were going?'
'It's no problem!' Janette, tiny and feisty as a firecracker, was on her feet, too. 'We screwed up, okay? We were talking and we screwed up. It was just a little dent, that's all.'
'Yeah,' Edward agreed. 'Busted our taillight but didn't do shit to the pigs. They weren't supposed to be parked right on our ass.'
'Edward?' It was CinCin's cool Oriental voice, her face like a carved yellow cameo framed with raven hair. 'Did they ask to see your driver's license?'
'Yeah.' A quick glance at Lord Jack. Mary sat in a rocking chair in the corner, her hands folded over the swelling of Jack's child in her belly. 'But it was no sweat,' Edward went on. The license was forged, as were all their licenses. Edward flipped his long brown ponytail back. 'The pig even laughed about it, said he'd busted up his own car last week and his old lady was still giving him hell about it.'
'Did the pigs follow you?' Akitta Washington asked. He was a barrel-chested black man who wore African beads and amulets around his neck, and he went to a window and peered out at the street.
'No. Hell, no. Why would they follow us?' There was a quaver in Edward's voice.
'Because,' Mary said from her rocking chair, 'some pigs have the sixth sense.' She had golden blond hair that hung around her shoulders, her face high-cheekboned and serene: the face of an outlaw Madonna. 'Some pigs can smell fear.' She cocked her head to one side, her eyes cool and intense. 'Do you think those pigs smelled any fear on you, Edward?'
'Get off his case!' Janette shouted. 'The pigs didn't roust us, okay? They just ID'd Edward and let us go, that's it!'
Lord Jack began to pace the room: a bad sign. 'Maybe it is okay,' Didi Morse said, sitting on the floor cleaning a revolver with the same fingers that could shape raw clay into objects of earthen art. She was a lovely young woman with green eyes and braided hair as red as a battle flag, her bone structure Iowa solid. 'Maybe it's no big deal.'
Sancho grunted, smoking a joint. Gary Leister was already attacking one of the pizzas, and James Xavier Toombs sat with his pipe clenched between his teeth and a book of haiku in his lap, his face as emotionless as a black Buddha.
'I don't like it,' Jack said. He went to the window, looked out, and paced again. 'I don't like it.' He continued to pace the room as some of the others began to feast on the pizzas. 'Snowden?' he said at last. 'Go upstairs and watch from the bedroom window.'
'Why do I have to go? I always get the shit detail!'
'GO!' Jack roared. 'And Edward, you get your ass upstairs and watch from the arsenal.' It was the room where all their weapons and ammunition were hidden in the walls. 'Move it, I said! Today, not next fucking week!'
They went. Jack's piercing blue gaze found CinCin. 'Walk up to Carazella's and buy a paper,' he told her. She left a slice of pizza half eaten and went without question, knowing he was telling her to go out and sniff the air for the stench of pigs. Then Jack walked over to Mary, and he placed his hand against her belly. She grasped his fingers and looked up into his fiery beauty, his long blond hair hanging around his shoulders and a hawk's feather dangling from a ring in his right earlobe. Mary started to say I love you, but she checked it. Lord Jack didn't believe in the word; what passed as love, he said, was a tool of the Mindfuck State. He believed in courage, truth, and loyalty, of brothers and sisters willing to lay down their lives for each other and the cause. One-to-one 'love,' he believed, came from the false world of button-down stiffs and their robotic, manicured prostitutes.
But she couldn't help it. She loved him, though she dared not say it. His wrath could strike like lightning and leave ashes in its wake.
Jack rubbed her belly, and he looked at Akitta. 'Watch the backyard.' Akitta nodded and went to do it. 'Gary! You walk to the Laundromat and back. Take a couple of dollars and get some change in the machine.' The Laundromat was two blocks away, in the opposite direction of Carazella's. Mary knew Jack was setting up a defensive perimeter. Gary walked out into the still, humid evening, and the smell of somebody's burgers on a grill drifted into the house. A dog barked in the distance, two more answering across the neighborhood.
Jack stood at the front window, working his knuckles. He said, 'I don't hear Frodo.'
James Xavier Toombs looked up from his haiku, his pipe in his mouth, and a small puff of blue smoke left his lips.
'Frodo.' Jack's voice was low and hushed. 'How come Frodo's not barking?'
Frodo was a stumpy little white mutt, the pet of the Giangello family two doors down the street. The Giangellos called him Caesar, but Jack had named him Frodo because of the dog's massive hairy paws. Frodo's bark was distinctive, a deep, throaty woof that started up with the regularity of a machine whenever any other dogs barked in the neighborhood. Jack looked at the other Storm Fronters. His tongue flicked out, lizardlike, to skim his lower lip. 'Frodo's quiet,' he said. 'How come?'
No one spoke. There was electricity in the room, the pizzas forgotten. Mary had stopped rocking, her hands gripped on the armrests. James Xavier Toombs returned the book of haiku to the well-stocked bookshelf. He removed a thick red volume titled Democracy in Crisis. He opened it and took his.45 automatic from the hollowed- out book. There was a crisp click as he checked the ammo clip. James Xavier Toombs, a man of few words, said, 'Trouble.'
Mary stood up, and the baby moved inside her as if it, too, were readying for action. 'I'll go upstairs and keep watch,' she said as she picked up a couple of slices of pizza and walked toward the stairs. Bedelia Morse took her revolver and went to the back to watch the northeastern corner of the house, Sancho took the southwestern corner, and Toombs and Lord Jack stayed in the front room. Mary checked on Edward and Janette; neither one had seen anything remotely suspicious. Then Mary settled herself in the small bedroom overlooking the street, and she sat in a chair near the window with the lights off. The lights were also off in the house directly across Elderman, but that was nothing unusual. The old couple who lived there, the Steinfelds, were in bed by seven o'clock, and it was after
