Nine
For several weeks Dorn spent the greater portion of his time in his house in Willow Falls. The weather turned quite warm, and the house was not air conditioned, but Dorn did not mind the heat. In recent years he had found himself less capable of enduring extreme cold temperatures, but hot weather had never bothered him.
Now and then he took a bus somewhere for all or part of a day, but he never stayed away overnight during this period. He went various places, observed various people, read various books and newspapers and periodicals, and spoke at various times on the telephone.
While he was thus engaged, several things happened here and there across the nation. In Chevy Chase, Maryland, Senator Willard Cosgriff (Rep., Colo.) lost control of his automobile and plowed into a concrete bridge support. He was killed instantly. Autopsy revealed an unusually high concentration of alcohol in his bloodstream. Senator Cosgriff had been a sharp critic of the administration’s war policy.
A bomb exploded in the main Chicago police station, killing three police officers engaged in clerical duties. Investigation failed to yield any positive clues, although an anonymous letter on behalf of the African Revolutionary Movement took credit for the bombing. The letter contained circumstantial information on the incident which had been withheld from publication. No organization named the African Revolutionary Movement had been previously known to the authorities, in either Chicago or Washington.
In response to the threat of a disturbance on the Bloomington campus of the University of Indiana, Governor James Danton Rhodine threw a cordon of National Guard troops around the campus. Simultaneously, forty-three student leaders were quietly arrested and charged with crimes ranging from possession of marijuana to fomenting rebellion and civil disorders. Bail was denied to all but five of the students. There was no subsequent disturbance on the campus, and the troops were called off after two days without a rock being hurled or a shot fired. Governor Rhodine’s several speeches and press conferences, in which he spoke of “nipping Red rebellion in the bud,” received extensive national press and television coverage.
A Louis Harris poll on 1972 presidential preferences for the first time included the name of James Danton Rhodine.
In Detroit, auto workers marching in support of the administration’s Indo-China policy clashed with peace demonstrators in a battle that raged for eight blocks on Woodward Avenue. Police units, ordered into action immediately by Mayor Walter Isaac James, later drew fire for their lackadaisical attitude in restoring order. Twenty-three auto workers and seventy-six peace marchers received hospital treatment, and two peace marchers subsequently died as the result of injuries sustained in the fray. Spokesmen for each side charged the other with deliberate organized provocation.
The cumulative death toll across the nation during this period of time included fourteen police officers and thirty-one persons identified as members or sympathizers of the Black Panther Party.
In Buffalo, New York, the headquarters of a branch of the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society was raided during the night by persons unknown. The Weathermen had opened this headquarters with an eye toward organizing white working-class support in Buffalo’s predominantly Polish East Side. The office was sacked, mimeograph equipment destroyed, and two Weathermen beaten to death.
The Secret Service investigated over twenty-five hundred threats on the lives of the President and Vice-President.
The baby robins, still uncertain fliers, began leaving their nest for longer periods of time.
Dorn saw Jocelyn almost every day, except for those days when he had business out of town. On afternoons when she did not visit him he found himself stalking uncertainly around the house and yard, picking things up and putting them down, waiting impatiently for her.
He held long conversations with her when she visited him, and longer conversations with her in his mind when she did not.
Jocelyn, you know nothing of the man I have been or even of the man I am. Jocelyn, I first killed a man when I was seventeen years old. I killed him because he was a Serb and I was a Croat. At the time this seemed sufficient reason. By the time I was your age, Jocelyn, I literally could not count the men I had killed. I did not know their number.
Often he read poetry. Blake. Yeats. Rilke. Schiller. Eliot.
“I brought a friend to see you,” she said one morning. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She held the friend in her arms, small and black, with white forepaws and a white tip to his tail.
“The notorious Vertigo,” he said. “I had begun to question the fact of his existence, as if he were God and I a Catholic adolescent. Welcome to my unworthy house, Vertigo.”
They sat with cups of tea. Dorn poured a saucer of milk for Vertigo, who sniffed it and walked away from it.
“Vertigo,” she said. “That’s not at all polite.”
“That is the strength of cats. They are not amenable to bribery.”
The cat walked from room to room, investigating. Jocelyn began to talk of James Danton Rhodine. This was not surprising to Dorn. He had noticed that more and more people were beginning to talk of James Danton Rhodine. The man projected vigor, imagination, strength. He knew the right words and spoke them with the ring of conviction. He talked of progress through a return to traditional American values. He praised the spirit of Godfearing American workers and farmers, who toiled for their bread and lived decent honest lives. He railed at the vipers of the left who would divide the country. He quoted Lincoln’s observation about a house divided. The vipers of the left, he suggested, were moved to divide and conquer.
“I just don’t know,” she said, her face troubled. “Everybody says he’s a reactionary, and I guess he is. But—”
“Yes?”
“Sometimes I can’t help feeling that some of the things he says make sense.”
“What do your friends say?”
“Everybody hates him. You know, ‘fascist bastard.’ He’s an obvious racist. He doesn’t come right out with it like that redneck Guthrie. But it’s there. There’s a phrase he uses. ‘The speckled band of subversion.’”
“I thought that was a reference to Sherlock Holmes. He calls radicals ‘vipers of the left,’ and the ‘speckled band’ was a snake in a Conan Doyle story.”
“I know. But first he’ll talk about the black nationalists, and then he’ll talk about radical college students, and then he’ll use this ‘speckled band’ thing. Like speckled black and white. That’s what I get from it.”
“I see. A subtly racist remark.”
“That’s it, Miles. He’s subtle. And he’s so great on television. There was one speech I saw, I only caught the tail end of it, and there wasn’t a thing he said that I especially agreed with, but when he finished, I don’t know, I felt like standing up and singing ‘God Bless America.’ I felt like marching.”