Leopard Eyes

“They say history is written by victors. I say history is written by those who write history. I want to get students to do history, not just memorize it.”

I said: “Give it a rest, professor. It’s drinking time.”

“I’ve got some history,” said an old man. Neither Marty nor I had realized he was there. He started his story:

“I’m used to the side-eye. People want to know what the cop is doing; they don’t want the cop to think they care what the cop is doing. But Britt’s not capable of guile. She doesn’t look at me unless she looks directly at me. She’s a leopardess, with big green eyes, telling a predator he’s been spotted.

“Nick and Britt Walsh come from Idaho to St. Joseph County, Michigan. That’s where I’m a sheriff’s deputy. They breed and train dogs. At first, I figure she’s leery because cops have a reputation for shooting dogs.

“Nick gets himself elected to the Mendon school board by making hay over petty corruption. He’s there a month; he launches a campaign to redo the history curriculum. He wants to ‘uncenter the American narrative’ and ‘decorporatize the lessons.’ People here don’t go for that thing; his school board days are short.

“I suss Britt’s doing veterinary work on the sly. I keep it to myself. Michigan says putting a band-aid on a gerbil is an act of veterinary medicine. So she starts to trust me. Then she starts to like me. The romance is cut short though when Nick is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

“‘He needs me. Maybe you know what that’s like. Don’t you feel needed as a cop?’

“So I move on. At least I think I do until Nick wanders through the corn for three days. I wait a week before visiting her. A piebald red-maroon van sits in the driveway. Michigan plates.

“At the door, she looks up, down, left, right, not directly at me. I tell her I’m sorry about Nick and ask if there is anything she needs.

“‘I’ll be OK. Nick’s cousins from Idaho are here.’

“I leave. As I recall, Nick’s got family in Chicago, not Idaho. And the van is neither from Idaho nor a rental. But mostly it’s her eyes that tell me something’s wrong.

“I drive down the road a hundred yards and run the plates. Owner: Jimmy Byers, twenty-seven, five-eleven, 145 pounds, red hair, blue eyes. Kalamazoo address. Three arrests for disturbing the peace dating to 2011. Portland, Washington, D.C., Chicago. Jimmy gets around.

“I walk back through the corn to Britt’s back door. It’s unlocked. I put my comms on silent and enter. To my left is the pantry. It’s dark there so I’m not worried about being seen. I can see through the kitchen to the entryway. The kitchen drawers and cabinets sit open. Pans, dishes, and jars clutter the counter. The floor is strewn with ripped boxes of food and mounds of paper. When my eyes adjust, I see I’m standing in a pile of coffee grounds and flour.

“I hear a slap and a cry from the front of the house. A man, middle-aged, says: ‘That cop is coming back here. No more time to screw around. You tell me where the book is now or I will kill you.’

“Another man, younger, says: ‘No! You said we weren’t going to hurt them—not seriously anyway.’ Could be Jimmy.

“Old Guy says: ‘Shut up!’ I hear them struggle.

“Time to move. With my .45 out, I creep into the kitchen. I’m going to walk through to the entryway where I can reach the front room by a passage to the right. But, as I move forward, I see to the right a doorway leading to a dining room. A guy with a long beard is sitting at a table, shuffling through a pile of papers. He’s got a Colt .38 at his elbow.

“I put my .45 on Long Beard. He raises his hands. I point to the ground. He nods and begins to slide out of the chair onto the ground.

“I hear Old Guy and Jimmy still struggling. A gun goes off and there are two screams.

“I step into the dining room. It opens to the front room where Old Guy is standing over Jimmy. I yell: ‘Police, freeze.’

“Old Guy turns and raises his gun. I put a shot through his chest. He’s down. Jimmy is down, shot through the gut. Britt is motionless on the couch, blood coming from her shoulder.

“Long Beard is on the floor. I cuff his hands behind his head. I report to dispatch. I check on Britt. It looks like the bullet went clean through Jimmy and hit Britt in the shoulder. She should be OK. Jimmy moans loudly, holding his gut. Old Guy is motionless, gone.

“Britt survives. Jimmy doesn’t.

“Sheriff’s detectives interview Britt in the hospital. I read their reports.

“She was always Britt, but in 1969 she was Britt Forrest, undergrad at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. There, she got into the various movements of the sixties. She met Nick at a Students for a Democratic Society meeting. But he wasn’t Nick Walsh then. He was Greg Holliday. They fell in love.

“Britt marched for her ideals. Greg pined for action. He believed the revolution needed more than debaters; it needed a push. So as Britt finished her Doctorate in Veterinary Science, Greg and a group of friends began planting bombs.

“He kept Britt in the dark until a house exploded with him inside it. It was another group’s bomb workshop. Greg was there to discuss coordinated action. A man named James showed Greg a little black book. James said he had discovered it when the group broke into an FBI field office in Cincinnati. The book contained hundreds of names. Some of them were counterculture figures that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would have considered enemies of the state. Others were politicians, judges, actors, businessmen—the muckety-mucks of America. Next to each entry was a series of numbers and letters. James said they were file references.

“After the bomb went off, Greg crawled out of the rubble, taking the black book with him. He was the only survivor. Britt saw his injuries and deduced he had been playing with bombs. She left him but returned when he swore off violence. But the group started getting rounded up. Knowing he would be identified as a conspirator, Greg obtained a false identity and moved to Idaho.

“In order to make sure the FBI didn’t follow Britt to her boyfriend, she made Britt Forrest disappear and showed up in Missoula with papers as Britt Pearson. She married Greg, now Nick. As Britt Walsh, nee Pearson, she possessed no veterinarian degree. They launched a business breeding and training dogs. Britt fell in love with the vocation and forgot about her veterinarian plans.

“Over the years, Britt and Nick developed an explanation for the black book. It went something like this: As Hoover got older, he began worrying his personal files would fall into the wrong hands when he died. Those files, legend had it, contained derogatory information about many individuals. So Hoover began sending his files for incorporation into the FBI’s main files. But he wanted to keep track of the juicy material. He filed that with anodyne subject names and recorded the file locations in the black book. When Hoover died in 1972, someone at headquarters obtained it. That person was later reassigned to Cincinnati.

“The book had little value without access to the source material it referenced. From time to time, Nick would leaf through it, wondering what knowledge of dark deeds Hoover had held over the individuals listed. It was proof, Nick would say, of the FBI’s hostility toward democratic ideals—if their theory was correct. Mostly the book was just a relic of their radical past, one they shared only with each other.

“Or so she thought until Jimmy, Old Guy, and Long Beard showed up.

“Long Beard fills in the rest for the detectives.

“He worked with Jimmy at a car wash, but Jimmy’s real profession was leftwing agitation. Jimmy went to Occupy Wall Street and then joined splinter groups in occupying this, that, and the other thing. Nick popped onto his radar when he started his campaign to remake the high school history curriculum in Mendon.

“Jimmy had a meet and greet. Nick spun tales about SDS; he made up being on one of the committees that drafted the Port Huron statement. Jimmy’s radical friends ate it up, but pretty soon Nick was out of material. He couldn’t keep up with the prog word salad; he didn’t know Fanon from a fart.

“So he started talking about bombings. Jimmy didn’t believe him at first. Then Nick showed up with a little black book, claimed he stole it from J. Edgar Hoover. Jimmy got an idea: Some of the names in the book were movement figures who sold out and made a fortune. Jimmy wanted to sell it back to one of them, like a ransom, and use the proceeds for the cause.

“Long Beard mentioned Jimmy’s idea to his friend Old Guy. Old Guy offered to help Jimmy get the book from Nick. Old Guy had his own plans. He was connected to the Chicago Outfit, but he was on the outs for some reason Long Beard can’t remember. Old Guy figured whatever Jimmy could get in ransom, the Outfit knew how to turn it into ten times as much. Once Old Guy had bought his way back in, he would give Jimmy a little payoff.

“I visit Britt in the hospital. She says: ‘I always told myself Nick never killed anyone. But that’s not true. Sure, none of his bombs killed anyone. He was careful that way. Later, the group did kill some people, but Nick was out by then. And that’s how I lived with his lack of repentance. But he was a part of it, and not just a part of it. He helped create the group, gave it direction. He put the thing in motion. So, yes, he was responsible.

“‘Listen, Joe. When those men were beating me, I thought I would offer them $50,000 to just go away. Nick and I have that buried in the back yard. It’s our getaway money. But I realized, they’ll just take that money and keep looking for the book, too. So I didn’t say anything about the money. Now I see what I should do with it.’

“She asks me to track down a young woman whose father had been a security guard at the First State Bank in Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1974. She thinks she would be about thirty today.

“‘Fifty-thousand dollars can’t make up for losing your father, but it’s the least I can do.’

“A week later, Britt develops an infection. I visit her every day for the next ten. They are the best ten days of my life. Then she’s gone.

“Nick is deemed not competent to stand trial for the bombings. He’s put in an institution, where he’ll die six years later.

“I rent the Walsh’s property and dig holes for six months. I never find the cash. So I never visit the daughter of a First State Bank security guard who was killed during a robbery in 1974. I also never find the black book.

“Possibly Nick knows. Just as possible, he’ll never remember. I visit him, not about the money. I just want to ask him if he realizes what he did to Britt.

“‘Revolutions require sacrifice,’ he says.

“‘It must be nice,’ I say, ‘to be one of the people who get to decide what other people must sacrifice.’

“I wait for a retort, but he’s away again, chasing loops in his mind.”

The old man finished, but Marty was on the phone. “I got the grant. $20,000.”