Love and Struggle by David Gilbert

Author:David Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2012-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

Encirclement

The phone wakes us up at two in the morning. The ring is ominous because only the handful of underground cadres in the city have the phone number. “This is Sonny; everyone has to clear out of the apartment,” the familiar but now breathless voices urges. “Immediately! Don’t stop to pack. The shoes just tried to run me down in the Chrysler. I managed to lose them in a mad-dash chase through a maze of side streets, and I ditched the car. But they have the license plate number. As you know, we used the same ID to register the car as for the utility bills on the apartment.”

The four of us are out of the Pine Street apartment and into the night in minutes, with just the clothes on our backs. I’m not even sure we gathered up all our back-up IDs. We hear sirens in the distance but we don’t see any surveillance on the street, so we carefully weave our way to another safehouse, in a completely different neighborhood. There we wait until six o’clock and the start of commuter traffic to send our one nonfugitive and little-known cadre back to check out the area. He reports that the Pine Street apartment is swarming with police and FBI…

It had started a few days earlier.

The upper half of my body was under the car, so there was no point in my coming out to show my face when the two men in suits, who looked out of place on this dirt road in the woods of Marin County, approached us. Cal and I were there trying to repair one of the collective’s cars: as I remember it, a Dodge Dart with the well-engineered slant-6 engine, which had broken down the day before. The car was registered in a woman’s name, actually a well-known fugitive, but there was no picture with the ID she had used.

I knew nothing about cars but Cal, from a Western and working-class background, was a pretty good mechanic. We were running partners at the time, and the idea was for him to teach me as we worked. That’s why I was under the car, and he was giving me instructions. Although a fugitive like me, Cal had not been a nationally known figure in SDS. Of course we were both well disguised, and the car we had arrived in was out of sight, so we looked like a couple of local “freaks” (slang for hippies) who had been commissioned to repair some woman’s car.

The two suits said they were real estate agents and asked if we knew of any property for sale in the area. Cal said, no, he didn’t know of any, and the suits departed. Cal, who had been cool in facing them, became agitated as he told me he was sure they were FBI, he could just smell it. Brown shoes were too common to be a definitive sign, though, and I thought he might be a bit paranoid or hyper-vigilant, which can easily happen underground.

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