Trip Wire_ A Cook County Mystery - Charlotte Carter [8]
Woody and Ivy questioned me about how I was spending my days. My answers were always polite, containing next to no solid information. The less they knew, the better.
I had read somewhere that Bobby Seale and Jean Genet would be speaking in the park. I knew the former, of course, but wasn’t exactly sure who the latter was. It was my friend and onetime English Lit professor, Owen Kittridge, who told me.
While I listened to Genet lecture in broken English, a tall, good-looking guy with a tangled ’fro took a seat near me on the grass. About ten minutes later, the ripsaw snoring began. The same cute, nappy-haired young man was sprawled out, dead to the world, making so much racket that Genet had to cut his speech short.
I remained there on the grass watching over the man I would soon come to know as Wilton Mobley as he slept like a baby. When he came to, an hour or so later, he rubbed his eyes very much as an infant would. “Got a smoke for me?” he asked.
And there went my heart.
We talked for hours, astonished to discover that his parents lived six blocks from Woody and Ivy in Hyde Park. But he had not lived with his folks since he’d come home from Antioch. They were furious that he’d dropped out. To escape their ire, he had taken a room in the same communal apartment on the North Side where an ex-classmate, Taylor Simon, lived.
I had found this wonderful boy in the park, a sleepyhead black prince, like something out of a fairy tale, and we agreed on everything:
What music did I listen to?
Yeah, he liked them, too.
Was I as sick of school as he was?
Pretty much.
Was I worried how I’d fit into the revolution, and was I equally as scared as I was excited?
Oh, yes . . . yes.
But had I had any of Owsley’s acid?
Jesus, wasn’t it amazing!
No end to the stuff we were solid on.
Some nice old white ladies making a tour of the park with a huge picnic basket gave us egg salad sandwiches and tangerines. As darkness fell, we smoked a joint together. I looked up at the stars, happy. Imagine it. Somebody like this, and eight hours ago I didn’t know he existed. Friends for life now, I thought—hoped.
Wilton said he had to take a leak and went off in search of one of those portable toilets. Before he could make his way back to me, people around me began to rise in waves. A wordless panic had taken hold of the masses. Then the tear gas settled over us like a cloak. I ran for it, blind, like a baby goat separated from its mother. The marathon conversation with my new best friend would have to wait for another day.
No matter, though. We had time. I’ll see him again, I told myself. I have his number at the commune.
On the day he first took me there, I was a nervous wreck. It was dinnertime, so most of the crew was in residence.
His voice was cheery as he introduced me to the others. “Hey, muthafuckahs, I got my little friend with me. All of y’all, say hello to Cassandra.”
His little friend? Lord, why did he have to put it that way? Wilton was all of twenty-three.
He hung his key ring on the Shaker coat rack behind the front door and then ushered me in.
Mia left her post at the stove and came over to embrace me. She’d heard so much about me; she knew how much Wilt thought of me and hoped I would become her good friend, too.
“What do people call you—Sandy?” she asked.
“Yes,” I lied.
At the table, I sat between Cliff Tobin, a lanky fellow from Connecticut who was a psych major at DePaul, and Dan Zuni, who took classes at the Art Institute. Despite his name, Mia informed me, he was in fact not a Zuni Indian but of the Isleta Pueblo tribe. Dan, who didn’t talk a lot, smiled appreciatively at her for the explanation.
Wilton often referred to his former