“I, uh, figured I’d go out for a little while, finish up later.”
“Then at least you could turn that radio off.”
“Uh.” Alec scuffed back down the hall and after a moment the noise stopped.
Celia arrived and gave her husband her wry smile and when Alec reappeared Winslow said, “You kids deplore the mechanization and dehumanization of technological life and you love this music that’s nothing but electronics and mechanical noise. It’s the least humanized music in the history of mankind. How can you explain that?”
“You always have to make sense out of things, don’t you?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Sometimes you need to just put it in the groove and let it wail. Anyhow why ask me about it? You’ve got plenty of straights full of fifty-dollar-an-hour reasons for everything everybody does.”
Winslow watched him. The boy shifted from foot to foot with his hands in his pockets and Winslow said, “Are you on something, Alec?”
“No.”
Winslow’s silence argued with him and Alec’s head lifted. “I know I’m stupid but I do know the difference between freaky kicks and getting hung. I’ve seen them ride and I’ve seen them fall. Nobody comes down easy. I don’t even try.”
Winslow followed it, more or less. “I believe you; does that make me a typical straight fool parent who believes everything his kid tells him?”
“I don’t know what it makes you.” Alec moved two steps sideways, like a crab. “It’s true, that’s all. I don’t use anything except maybe grass now and then, and I don’t keep that at home.”
“I’m grateful for that.”
“Because you won’t get raided?”
“Because I can’t stand the smell of the stuff. Is there something on your mind, Alec? Something you want to talk to me about?”
“Uh, I was going to ask you, what are you going to do about Senator Forrester?”
It startled him. “What?”
“He’s a heavy guy, Dad.”
“And?”
“Everybody figures he wants to inspect the base, and a lot of people are waiting to see, uh, what you guys are going to do about it. I mean, if you guys try to shoot down Senator Forrester it could make a lot of noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
“Look, there’s walking around the air-base gate with picket signs like they’re doing now, and then there’s going out on that jet runway and having a sit-in on the pavement.”
“To stop the planes?”
“It’s been mentioned.”
“Did those kids tell you to put it to me that I’d better help Senator Forrester or else?”
“Or else what, Dad?”
“I do a job. My job isn’t going to be influenced by any crazy attempts at extortion.”
“No extortion. The people are just waiting to see what happens, that’s all.” Alec’s expression changed briefly, more a tic than a smile; he lunged toward the door.
Celia appeared in the kitchen door. “Dinner’s going to be on the table soon.”
“Save me a slice cold. I got to go.”
Winslow said, “You might have told your mother before.”
“Okay, I forgot. Is that a misdemeanor or something?”
Celia said, “Go to your meeting. I’ll keep your plate warm for you.”
Alec took a hand out of his pocket to open the front door and went out without saying good-bye.
Winslow said, “That kid doesn’t even know how to spell discipline.”
When he heard Alec’s car start away with a guttural belch of noise he crossed the room and propped his shoulder in the kitchen doorway. “I hope they’re just blowing off steam. They wouldn’t get as far as the runway of course but if they did they might get hurt—a dose of jet exhaust wouldn’t leave much of them.”
She looked up from the stove but there was no time for a reply. The doorbell rang.
Ramsey Douglass was narrow as a plank and clothed in a slim sharkskin suit that gave him an air of slick elegance. He was a little sickly with his conspiratorial mannerisms; there was something silken and rustling about him. Middle age had settled his eyebrows into arches of perpetual irony. He sat on the small of his back, filled with sleepy sardonic arrogance. All through dinner he had filled the air with tart bitter commentaries: he had a ruthless and superficial felicity with words.
Winslow had eaten very little and consumed the lion’s portion of the Beaujolais.
Douglass was Matthewson-Ward’s SATAF coordinator and that put him at home both in the hardware industry and in Air Force circles; he was also deep in local politics and had been Congressman Trumble’s chief campaign-speech writer.
Douglass sipped cognac and chain-smoked and held forth in his wintry caustic voice. “You cradle them in comforts, you sell yourselves on the curious notion that they’re the most dedicated and principled and magnificent generation ever born, you accept without argument the proposition that they alone recognize the maladies of the world and have the wisdom to chart a new course for us all. What the hell do you expect them to do when you hand them carte blanche?”
Winslow made a noncommittal sound to indicate he was listening.
“You parents let them overrun you. You let them overrun their teachers and their school administrators. You’re refusing to defend civilized values against these barbarian kids—you’re handing them the world and telling them it’s theirs to play with. I promise you I’m not nearly as afraid of the warmongers and capitalists and polluters and over populaters as I am of these babies. What’s going to happen to the civilizations we know when this generation of ugly self-indulgent brats grows old enough to take over? What have any of them accomplished that earns them the right to be held up as the sages of our age?”
Celia laughed at him. She had that strength. Winslow had known him half his lifetime but had never developed nerve enough to laugh at Douglass. Celia said, “They started with sensible ideals, Rams. It wasn’t until they saw that nobody was listening to them that they started to get raucous.”
“Nobody was listening? Christ we were listening. We listened to them tell us that Mao was the only real Communist, that the Panthers are just peace-loving folks at heart, that there’s no choice between the USSR and the USA because they’re both fascist dictatorships, that the kids have the right to destroy the universities because they don’t like the color of the wall paint. We listened, Celia. We just didn’t believe it. These kids talk peace and make guerrilla war with terrorist tactics. They reject materialism and they embrace Daddy’s credit card. They claim the establishment won’t budge from its unyielding position but they offer nothing but nonnegotiable demands. They tell us to open our eyes and they glaze their own with drugs. They—”
“All right,” Celia said. “We get the point. You’re turning into an archconservative, Rams.”
“Hell, I’m the only one in this room who hasn’t sold out to bourgeois values. These babies aren’t leftists. They’re babies, playing with toys because you gave them the toys to play with.”
“But don’t you find something gallant about them? At least they’re willing to question the bourgeois values. They may be the first generation in history that’s dared to challenge the contradiction between ideals and realities.”
“Crap. Infantile romanticism. They’re a kept generation—no sense of humor, they can’t communicate with each other without sex because nobody ever gave them an incentive to learn basic English. They’re experts at hooting down speakers and breaking up meetings—they’ll defend to the death your right to agree with them but if you argue rationally their only answer is to shout you down and throw bombs. It makes me think of Hitler’s brownshirts. Did you ever hear one of these kids stand up and insist that the kids should be expected to live up to their own demands? They make great high moral demands on everybody but themselves. Disagree with them and right away you’re pigeonholed: another brainwashed member of the mindless fascist mass. Including you and me, which is pretty damn funny, you know. In Russia these kids would be put away until they learned the meaning of loyalty.”