She has a lovely voice, all right, he realized. Like a silver bell. Like water in the desert.
It was a haunting voice. And her face, framed by long midnight-black hair, had a fine-boned dark-eyed ascetic look to go with it. She sat on a high stool, under a lone spotlight, blue-jeaned legs crossed and guitar resting on one knee.
As Kinsman was trying to work up the nerve to introduce himself to her and tell her how much he enjoyed her singing, a dozen kids his own age shambled into the place. The singer, just finished her song, smiled and called to them. They bustled around her.
Kinsman turned his attention to his beer. By the time he had finished it, the students had pushed several tables together and were noisily ordering everything from Sacred Cows to Diet 7-Up. The singer had disappeared. It was full night outside now.
«You alone?»
He looked up, startled, and it was her. The singer.
«Uh… yeah.» Clumsily he pushed the chair back and got to his feet.
«Why don’t you come over and join us?» She gestured toward the crowd of students.
«Sure. Great. Love to.»
She was tall enough to be almost eye level with Kinsman, and as slim and supple as a young willow. She wore a black long-sleeved turtleneck pullover atop the faded denims.
«Hey, everybody, this is …» She turned to him with an expectant little smile. All the others stopped their conversation and looked up at him.
«Kinsman,» he said. «Chet Kinsman.»
Two chairs appeared out of the crowd, and Kinsman sat down between the singer and a chubby blonde girl who was intently rolling a joint for herself.
Kinsman felt out of place. They were all staring at him, except for the rapt blonde, without saying a word. Wrong uniform, he told himself. He might as well have been wearing a Chicago policeman’s riot suit.
«My name’s Diane,» the singer said to him, as the bar’s only waitress placed a fresh beer in front of him.
«That’s Shin, John, Carl, Eddie, Delores …» She made a circuit of the table and Kinsman forgot the names as soon as he heard them. Except for Diane’s.
They were still eying him suspiciously.
«You with the National Guard?»
«No,» Kinsman said. «Air Force Academy.»
«Going to be a flyboy?»
«A flying pig!» said the blonde on his left.
Kinsman stared at her. «I’m going in for astronaut training.»
«An orbiting pig,» she muttered.
«That’s a stupid thing to say.»
«She’s upset,» Diane told him. «We’re all on edge after what happened at Kent State today.»
«Kent State?»
«You haven’t heard?» It was an accusation.
«No. I was flying this afternoon and—»
«They gunned down a dozen students.»
«The National Fuckin’ Guard.»
«Killed them!»
«Where?»
«At Kent State. In Ohio.»
«The students were demonstrating against the Cambodian invasion and the National Guard marched onto the campus and shot them down.»
«Christ, don’t they let you see the newspapers?»
«Or TV, even?»
Kinsman shook his head weakly. It was like they were blaming him for it.
«We’ll show them, those friggin’ bastards!» said an intense, waspish little guy sitting a few chairs down from Kinsman. Eddie? he tried to remember. The guy was frail-looking, but his face was set in a smoldering angry mold, tight-lipped. The thick glasses he wore made his eyes look huge and fierce.
«Right on,» said the group’s one black member. «We gonna tear the campus apart.»
«How’s that going to help things in Cambodia?» Kinsman heard his own voice asking. «Or in Kent State?»
«How’s it gonna help?» They looked aghast at his blasphemy.
«Yeah,» Kinsman answered, wanting to bounce some of their hostility back at them. «You guys tear up the campus. Big deal, what do you accomplish? Maybe the National Guard shoots you. You think Nixon or anybody else in Washington will give a damn? They’ll just call you a bunch of Commies and tell everyone we’ve got to fight harder over in ‘Nam because the whole country’s full of subversives.»
«That doesn’t make any sense,» Eddie said.
«Neither does ripping up the campus.»
«But you don’t understand,» Diane said. «We’ve got to do something. We can’t let them kill students and draft us into a war we never declared. We’ve got to show them that we’ll fight against them!»
«I’d go after my Congressmen and Senators and tell them to get us out of Vietnam.»
They laughed at him. All but Eddie, who looked angrier still.
«You don’t understand anything about how the political process works, do you?» Eddie accused.
Now I’ve got you! «Well,» Kinsman answered, «an uncle of mine is a U.S. Senator. My grandfather was Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And a cousin is in the House of Representatives. I’ve been involved in political campaigns since I was old enough to hold a poster.»
Silence. As if a leper had entered their midst.
«Jesus Christ,» said one of the kids at last. «He’s with the Establishment.»
«Your kind of politics,» Diane said to him, «doesn’t work for us. The Establishment won’t listen to us.»
«We’ve got to fight for our rights.»
«Demonstrate.»
«Fight fire with fire!»
«Action!»
«Bullshit,» Kinsman snapped. «All you’re going to do is give the cops an excuse to bash your heads in—or worse.»
The night, and the argument, wore on. They swore at each other, drank, smoked, talked until they started to get hoarse. Diane had to get up and sing for the other customers every hour, but each time she finished she came back and sat beside Kinsman.
And still the battle raged. The bar finally closed and Kinsman found that his legs had turned rubbery. But he went with them along the dark Berkeley streets to someone’s one-room pad, four flights up the back stairs of a dark old house, yammering all the way, arguing with them all, one against ten. And Diane was beside him.
They started drifting away from the apartment. Kinsman found himself sitting on the bare wooden floor, halfway between the stained kitchen sink and the new-looking waterbed, telling them: «Look, I don’t like it any more than you do. But violence is their game. You can’t win that way. Blow up the whole damned campus, and they’ll blow up the whole damned city to get even with you.»
One of the students, a burly shouldered kid with a big beefy face and tiny squinting eyes, was sitting on the floor in front of Kinsman.
«You know your trouble flyboy? You’re chicken.» Kinsman shrugged at him and looked around the floor for the can of beer he had been working on.
«You hear me? You’re all talk. But you’re scared to fight for your rights.»
Kinsman looked up and saw that Diane, the blonde girl, and two of the guys were the only ones left in the room.
«I’ll fight for my rights,» Kinsman said, very carefully because his tongue wasn’t always obeying his thoughts. «And I’ll fight for your rights, too. But not in any stupid-ass way.»
«You callin’ me stupid?» The guy got to his feet. A weight lifter, Kinsman told himself. And he’s going to show off his muscles on me.
«I don’t know you well enough to call you anything,» he said.