Jack of Ravens(155)
Immediately afterwards, Church, Niamh, Tom, Gabe and Marcy left town and headed west.
8
While President Johnson was outlining his Great Society, they were holed up in a leaky warehouse in St Louis. By the time the US had started bombing North Vietnam in earnest on 8 February 1965, they had moved to slightly better surroundings in an old meat-packing plant in Chicago.
There was no sign of the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders anywhere near their lives. Church couldn’t make the guilt go away entirely; he knew they were being left alone because he had chosen to walk away from the battlefield. With the lamp containing his stolen Pendragon Spirit still safe in his bag, he could claim to be little more than an average person, trudging through life below the radar of the forces that controlled everything.
On 21 February, black revolutionary leader Malcolm X was shot and killed. Marcy cried all night and there was nothing Gabe could do to drag her out of her growing despair at the worsening political situation.
All around them the misery continued to mount. On 6 March the first American soldier officially set foot on Vietnam’s battlefields, and two days later 3,500 marines landed to protect Da Nang airbase. In between, Alabama state troopers attacked 500 civil rights workers preparing to march, and by the end of the month the Ku Klux Klan had murdered another civil rights worker in the same state. At home and abroad, the spider-people – in metaphor and reality – continued to take control, spreading despair, crushing hope.
‘Existence needs its king to lead its troops,’ Tom said to Church as he browsed a day-old paper one morning. Church gave his standard response: it was somebody else’s job now.
Over the months, to Tom’s annoyance, Niamh had sided with Church. She pointed out that people were fighting back of their own accord. Martin Luther King Jr. and 25,000 supporters took the fight for civil rights back to Alabama. A further 25,000 marched on Washington in April to protest against the spiralling Vietnam War.
‘Music is the voice of hope,’ she pointed out to Tom as he listened to his growing record collection, and he had to agree: Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and Judy Collins joined the anti-war marches, and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan spread the message of discontent.
On 5 September, writer Michael Fallon applied the term ‘hippie’ to the San Francisco counterculture in an article about the Blue Unicorn Coffeehouse where campaigners for sexual freedom and the legalisation of marijuana met.
And on Christmas Day 1965, the Libertarian came to town.
9
‘You don’t get it, Gabe. Standing up and fighting for what you believe in is the only way. Malcolm was right. If you turn the other cheek they’ll just keep slapping it.’ Marcy had changed more than all of them in the months they had been together. She’d developed a flintiness as a defence against the attacks that were coming from all quarters.
She trudged through the snow towards the convenience store in her boots and ragged jeans, a thrift-store coat pulled tight for warmth, annoyed at the childish frivolity of Church and Gabe who had stopped for a snowball fight.
‘If you get involved in violence and confrontation you’re just as bad as the people you’re opposing,’ Gabe protested. ‘There’s always a peaceful route. JFK could have bombed the Communists like all the hawks in the White House wanted, but he talked his way out of it and saved the world in the process.’
When she was trying to keep her anger inside, Marcy always held her head in a way that made her appear haughty. ‘This is a war, and you’re on one side or the other. There’s no room for sitting on the fence. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Sooner or later you’ve got to choose, Gabe.’
‘You know I’m with you.’ Gabe turned to Church. ‘What do you think?’
Marcy snorted. ‘There’s no point asking him. He’s already dropped out.’
Her comments were delivered off the cuff, but they stung Church. The hardest part was that he couldn’t argue with her because she was right.
While Gabe and Marcy went into the store to pick up supplies, Church watched the children playing in the park across the street and the gulls swooping across the Windy City’s skyline. It was a grey and white world of dirty snow and industrial smoke, the kids’ anoraks the only colour.
Every day his thoughts turned back to that day in Leary’s study and the revelation of why the world was the way it was. He hoped that soon it would fade and he could drift into a soporific acceptance. Marlowe must have known the truth all those years ago when he briefly broke off from his spy games to write Doctor Faustus: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.