Read Online Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover - Free Book Online Page A

helping him (“He’s okay, he’s got good calluses,” Leo explained), that there was a group planning to march on the plant as soon as it got dark. Bill estimated there were about a hundred of them, but that they’d take others with them. He said he’d tried to talk them out of it, as Leo had asked, but they’d got pretty hostile toward him, accusing him of being a lackey and a company fink. A lot of the local workers had drifted away around suppertime, the women and children as well, the crowd was becoming increasingly hard-core, many of them from out of town, and, as Bill pointed out, there was now a lot more drinking going on. This was true, I’d noticed it myself. Several members of the organizing committee had left by now as well, and I could see that Leo was seriously considering joining the exodus. He argued with individuals that a march on the plant now would serve no purpose at all, that it would only give the police an opportunity to beat up and arrest a lot of men we would need on Sunday, and that it might even give the authorities an excuse to bring in enough force to make the Memorial Day demonstration impossible. As individuals, they all tended to agree with him, but as a group they still seemed determined to march. They wanted something to happen, they didn’t care what. “Ah well, it’ll give us something to talk about on Sunday, I guess,” he said finally, turning to a guy with a bottle. “Lemme have a swig of the people’s cornjuice, Smitty.” He took a deep suck on the bottle, handed it to me with an airy wheeze. “Have a bracer, Meyer,” he said with a crooked smile, barely visible now in the deepening dusk, “and get ready for history.”
    By the time we’d formed up outside Sam’s Place, there were nearly a thousand of us, and Leo, ever the pragmatist, had not only by now accepted the inevitable, he was even helping to organize it. Instead of marching straight across the rough field where we might stumble and fall in the dark, we headed south down Green Bay Avenue, keeping the field on our right. There was still a faint glow on it, as if the bright day had left a residue, as in phosphorescent rock. It looked mysterious, almost otherworldly. Leo had put me on the right flank, near the guy named Smitty, whom we’d both come to suspect of being a police plant and agitator (maybe it was the lethal quality of his booze that had given him away), and told me to keep an eye on him while he took the other flank. At 117th Street, we turned west toward the main gate, but we didn’t get far: the police were waiting for us there. It was as though they’d known all along we were coming. Of course we’d been shouting a lot in the dark echoey night, and a couple of cops had got pushed aside further up the street, it was hardly a secret. But even before we’d reached them, they seemed to be in our midst. That was when I got my black eye, and a bruise or two elsewhere besides. It was pitch-dark and there was a lot of confusion, fists and clubs flying, bricks as well, but I had no doubt who it was who hit me. I’m used to looking at the world through dark goggles, after all, and seeing more than most. I’d been knocked to the ground and was having a hard time getting up. I heard shots being fired, people screaming. It was Bill and Smitty who rescued me, dragging me away from the melee, upfield toward Sam’s Place. The strikers were quickly routed by their own confusion, but a lot of heads got broken first. Some would need a hospital. The vanguard especially took a beating, but Leo, as I knew he’d be, was all right. “Sorry, Meyer,” he said when he saw me, and as far as I could tell, he truly was.
    â€œBill,” I said.
    â€œThat sonuvabitch…”
    â€œBill and Smitty.” They’d disappeared, of course, ostensibly to hurl themselves back into the fight, but it was clear