Tin Soldiers
by Kirk Bjornsgaard

Donna paused on the steps of the student on the evening of the Kent State shootings and studied thunderheads roiling above the Toledo River. They invoked in her little-girl notions that God brought storms (until she checked herself with the atheism sweeping the Milestone College campus that semester). She assessed herself in the mirror hanging over the polished marble fireplace in the foyer, stroking her long chestnut hair and nodding terse approval at her denim, leotards, and khaki clothing.
Descending the circular staircase to the basement, thought again how Chris---flanked by his entourage---had sauntered up to her in the dining commons and requested that she report for duty after dinner. How her girl friends had flashed excited, wide-eyed grins that heightened her excitement. "God, Donna! Freshman never win that kind of attention from seniors!" Perhaps the 3.8 average in her dual majors (political science and ceramics) enabled them to refute the administration's charge that the political left attracted only losers. Maybe Chris and his campus organizers dug a renegade who kept her own counsel, remained open to all points of view, and slept alone, as if to emphasize her independence.
When Donna walked into the suite of dingy, low-ceilinged offices she looked around for Chris. Another senior directed her to where students worked a phone bank along a wall. She quickly grew bored reciting a cold, listless script to anti-war leaders on other campuses, taking down names and numbers, determining the scope of the planned demonstration in Washington that weekend---and finally called a number she knew by heart.
"Yeah, I heard about Kent State on Huntley-Brinkley," Daddy told her. "Kids throwing rocks at National Guard troops...warning shots fired back at 'em..."
"They killed four of my fellow students, Daddy!"
"Why were Milestone kids at Kent?"
"I-I mean that college students everywhere are in this together!"
She tensed when his sigh rattled on the line. She felt 4 years old again. "Donna Marie Vincent, it was hard enough on your mother and me when the principal reported you for trying to force current events into the high school debate club. When you left our Methodist faith to go off and join that Quaker Meeting---"
"Daddy, none of that ever hurt my grades."
"That ain't the point! You're smart enough to be two people and work hard enough to be six. I've always been proud of you for that. Your mother was, too. But there's some real crazy people on these campuses, planning these...these riots. That's what they are! And for reasons I've never figured out, you're like the moth who's always drawn to the brightest, most dangerous flames."
"I have a path to follow. It won't include getting shot. What would you have me do?"
"Maybe enroll at a school here locally, like Ralph Cadwallader did." Daddy chuckled. "Maybe even re-think his proposal."
"Good-bye, Daddy!"
Chris slid into the seat beside her as she cradled the phone. "Are we advancing the cause over here?"
She felt Daddy's unwanted common sense envelope her. Displaying her smudged ditto-master script, she replied, "My hometown's a carbon copy of Milestone. Suppose...I mean, what if all we do in D.C. Saturday is piss people off?"
Chris leaned forward in the gray metal folding chair. Rumpled---that's how Mom would have described him, she decided. His dark, curly hair was too long for the part he favored on the left side. Thick, tortoise-shell glasses continually slid down the long, thin nose of an animated, cartoonish face when he spoke. Blue jeans and a black tee shirt suited the warm May evening; the pockets of his beige work shirt (subbing for the sports jacket Daddy would have required) bulged with scribbled notes and a pack of Marlboros.
 "Getting people's attention is what we're doing. It's the object of political action," Chris said. "Has been, since the Boston Tea Party." He gestured around the stuffy, crowded room full of kids at phones, at ditto machines, inking posters like the pep club getting ready for The Big Game. "I'm pissed off that the Milestone paper and Toledo TV stations aren't here reporting all this, like I asked them to!"
"Why?"
Under the buzz of strident conversation, Chris' voice took on a dark intimacy, like an announcer on an "underground" rock radio station. "If a demonstration falls in an empty town, does it make a headline? What is the sound of one hand clapping, if it's a Black Power salute raised where no one can see it?"
"It's like...it's like drama makes our actions effective," Donna said.
Chris nodded slowly. "You dig this. I can tell. You dig direct political action for the same reasons I do, Donna: Moral conviction without action to support it is as wrong as holding the wrong convictions in the first place."
Daddy's lecture paled in the glow from Chris' eyes. It took Donna a moment to realize he was staring at her breasts. When she giggled, Chris slowly resettled his gaze on hers. "You're a beautiful woman, Donna. I don't know who's got your heart locked up, baby, but he's a lucky dude."
He slid out of the chair and moved on. In his musky wake she sensed not just acceptance but...attraction. "You're sooooo much cooler than Ralphie," she muttered, as she turned back to the phones, "and Ralph Cadwallader was the best Decatur could offer me."
A revelation seized her. She dug an address book from her purse and dialed the Cadwallader residence. "Ralphie---?"
"Donna? Hey! Outasight! You finally returned my call."
"...I'm sorry...?"
His chuckle sounded familiar, comfortable. "I called over Christmas break. Guess your dad didn't tell you. What's up? You're at school?"
"Ralph...didn't you apply to Kent State University?"
"They had the better engineering school but my old man insisted I attend his alma mater."
"So you could be dead right now!"
"I don't think Dad would have taken it that hard."
"No! I mean you could have been one of the kids killed there today!"
Ralph's tone grew as dark as the clouds dimming the Toledo skyline. "Why does that make you happy?"
"Jesus, Ralph! Don't go psycho on me." She grabbed her pencil and bent over a yellow legal pad in her lap. "How many Tewksbury College kids are going to Washington this weekend?"
"...Washington...?"
"For the mobilization, of course!"
"I'm not going anywhere. I've got a project in rotary mechanics due Monday morning."
She slapped down the pencil. "Christ, Ralph! They're killing us this time!"
"You think a field trip would get me an extension on my project?"
Donna had been fanning herself with her script. She slammed it to the table like the pencil. Her knuckles went numb. "Don't you remember the hassles in high school over your long hair and my short skirts? The draft resistance leaflets we passed out that nearly got us suspended? Don't you remember what that felt like?"
"All I know is, this is the first time in eight months you've bothered to call me."
Donna gasped. She tried to imagine what a rageful Ralph looked like. She'd seen him drunk, seen him naked, seen his boy-next-door features mature and change over 18 years---but this was the first time she'd ever experienced Ralph Cadwallader talking back. It intrigued her. "Oh, Ralph. We talked about---about all that before I cam out here, last fall. You want to get your engineering degree and take over your dad's business. All I want---"
"I'm not trying to make you fall in love with me anymore." His words stung. "I'm asking you to listen to yourself. You're radical politics are eating you alive."
Donna flinched when the senior overseeing the phone bank tapped her shoulder. "Everything all right?" His quizzical grin suggested that everyone in the room could hear her overheated conversation. "Just fine," she said, forcing a smile. When he walked on, she glanced around the room again. Chris was gone. She closed her eyes. "I'm sorry, Ralph. Ever since we heard about Kent State, it's been crazy!"
She winced at her use of Daddy's word. Ralph's tone eased toward compassion. "Look, good luck in D.C. this weekend. Maybe we can get together back here this summer."
"Absolutely! I'll call you if I---"
But she was speaking into a dead connection.

Ralph shuffled into the apartment's living room and snapped, "You wanna turn that TV down? Some of us are trying to study."
Angie Riccobono's weasel eyes shone in the reflected glow. "You oughta be watching this stuff about Kent State."
Ralph felt his tension ratchet when the lanky boy on the other end of the couch glanced up. "Bad phone call?" Ted Stoddard asked.
Ralph leaned against the doorway. Rubbed his hands across his freckled moon face and scratched fingers through his thick, Brillo-frizzy curls. "Remember the night we went off on that Romilar bender?" he asked. "When we saw the MC5 down at the Roxy? And I told you guys I proposed to my high school girl friend after I got drunk at the prom?"
Both boys' heads swiveled and they stared at him. "That's who just called you?" Their chant twisted the knife Donna had plunged into a wound Ralph had thought healed. "I woulda thought you got over her after Ronnie moved in here with you!" Angie chuckled.
"Ah, but she's the fish that got away," Ted told him.
Ralph closed his eyes and saw Donna's face superimposed on TV news footage of swirling gunfire, helmeted soldiers, and blood-stained tie-dye. "I think we should go to Washington," he said.

Donna stumbled out of bed and stole a capsule from a bottle of muscle relaxers her roommate used for a chronic disc problem. She found the eye of the storm in the soothing waters of the shower down the hall but grimaced at what she saw into the full-length mirror back in her room. A knock at the door and Chris' voice startled her. "Hey, Donna! Open up!"
She forced a reckless grin as he swept into the room. Damp, stringy curls weighed on her head and she wished that she wore something less juvenile than a white terrycloth bathrobe. "You're already in," she sighed.
Chris walked to the window. He stared at the crimson sunrise glowing through trees that separated the college campus from Milestone. He had not forsaken his jeans, motorcycle boots, nor his pastel tee shirt and unbuttoned flannel overshirt. His hair resembled a field of Monkey Grass. "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning," he mumbled.
Sadly heroic, she decided. Her heart beat faster as she gently swung closed the door. "Have you slept at all?"
When he turned she felt energized by his crooked smile. "Not a wink! Listen...that was an excellent suggestion you made last night, in our meeting after the phone work. We called the charter bus company about a discount rate for an 'educational institution' and we got a dozen buses for what two woulda normally cost!"
"Are we going to need that many...?"
Chris' grin lost all traces of juvenile humor. "My committee just finished meeting with the dean. As of noon, the administration is closing this place for the weekend---we're all going to Washington!"
Donna felt her breath snatched away. "They've joined us!"
Chris cackled. "No way, man! We told the dean, if you hold classes---no one's attending!"
"...Oh..."
Chris slid a step closer. "Don't get bummed by that, Donna! It's compromise! We make demands---they give in!" He dropped his voice to his FM-radio intimacy. "I got something more important for you to think about this morning."
The hormonal hope seized her, that her roommate would dawdle over breakfast for the next couple of hours.
"The committee also decided we want you on the platform this afternoon at the rally, before we get on those buses. We want some words out of you!"
Donna's feigned composure evaporated. She felt as if the roof had been peeled back and the rising sun anointed her. "What should I say?"
His smile felt holy to her. "Some of the tales you were telling us last night at the student union, about trying to raise the consciousness of your jerkwater Pennsylvania hometown. You have this common sense that the rest of us get going too fast to consider, Donna. That's what I want you to share."
"I'll...I'll pull together some thoughts, then..." She smiled---demurely, she hoped. "And some clothes..."
Her hormones sang when Chris gave her an exaggerated once-over, top to toes, and grinned. "I suppose 'clothes' would be more effective with this crowd. Listen, I got other folks to see..."
He slipped from the room as quickly as he had disappeared from the basement room at the student union he night before. Closing the door and walking back to the mirror, Donna tried to re-order her thoughts. "The bathrobe is why he didn't stay longer," she decided.
Then her eyes fell on a framed color snapshot on her tidy bureau---a picture Chris must have seen: Ralph Cadwallader, dressed in a red velour pullover top and his khaki parka, smiling at her. She dropped the picture into a sock drawer. "Chris makes me feel things I've gotta check it out."

By the time she was seated on the platform at the north end of the gym, Donna decided she didn't like her outfit---black denim jeans, black pullover "muscle" shirt, and unbuttoned iridescent Hawaiian blouse. It was the product of a dozen costume changes and one more wouldn't have mattered; Donna knew that, too.
Emotional exhortations alternated with logistics; politics were important but so was not marching off in the wrong direction. "The National Mobilization Committee designates the White House end of the Ellipse as the site of the demonstration," someone intoned. "The Ellipse is not large enough by half to contain our anger!" Chris raged to the packed, sweaty gym. He confessed, as he sat down beside Donna, that he had no idea how big the grassy park was.
She studied her notes, hastily composed on sandalwood-colored stationery Daddy had sent her for Christmas, but they started her thinking again about Ralph. Sure, they'd grown up together---practically brother and sister under separate roofs. But until he had sprung his marriage proposal at the after-prom party she had never considered becoming his wife. Or anyone else's! Is that what he couldn't understand? Home economics had withered on Donna's academic vine in a career that other wise produced honor roll fruit. She had cared for Daddy and Sis after Mom died, of course, but that was...different. That was an emergency. "Marriage is not a part of the Revolution," she murmured now. Studying Chris' profile, she wondered, Do my desires lie with him?
By the time he introduced her, Donna had forced herself to concentrate on cursive sentences framed by daisies and forget-me-nots---charges that the Nixon Administration's war policy compromises the unborn future generations carried in the womb of every woman here. "This is no time for diary entries from a life I'm putting behind me," she told herself.

Squeezing everyone into Ted's powder-blue Mustang that morning reminded Ralph of the classic college trick of stuffing a phone booth. "We'll make like volleyball players," Ted announced, as they rolled south from the Tewksbury campus, "and rotate seats every hunnert miles."
"Sounds good!" Cindy said, from where she sat beside him up front. From where she perched on the driveshaft hump between Ralph and Angie, Ronnie sniffed, "It's gonna take a whole volleyball team to lift me outta here!"
Angie laughed. "You'll be outta here in a heartbeat if Ralph sees this Donna chick."
She clamped her porcelain-white hands around Ralph's knee. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law!"
The petite blonde's boldness caused Ralph to laugh. But when she leaned against him and he closed his eyes he felt Donna's presence. He saw he sitting with her mom, dad, and sister at their dining room table on one of those evenings he'd been invited in for dinner. He stumbled over her words from the night before: You want to get your engineering degree and take over your dad's firm...and I want...
Ralph blinked open his eyes. To earn a liberal arts degree? To come back to Decatur, marry, and raise a family? It sounded ludicrous to even think so. How could he have been so wrong about her? We were going steady. She became "mom" after her mother died. Wasn't she training for the role I wanted her to play---the role I thought she wanted?
"We're liberated college students," Angie lectured Ronnie. "Jealousy is out of fashion."
"And Ralph's out of circulation!" she chirped.
Ralph nestled against her. It was childish to want to do so---he knew that; but Ralph decided parading Ronnie in front of Donna today might be the best way to finally break the emotional link to a girl who was rapidly becoming a memory.

By lagging behind her girl friends, Donna joined Chris in chasing kids off the lead bus. "I've never worked as a parade marshal before," she told him.
He took her hand as they crossed into the park with the swarms of other kids and adults dressed in tie-dye, jeans, and beads. His touch carried electricity and the message that he wanted her to stay with him. "This is just the foreplay event, anyway," he told her as they settled onto the grassy meadow of the Ellipse with the other Milestoners. Grinning at her, he added: "You know anything about foreplay?"
Donna countered his leer with a carefully crafted smile. "Maaaaybe..." She hoped she looked reasonable presentable. The image reflected in bus stop ladies' rooms had increasing been that of a Seventeen magazine cover crammed into a too-small mailbox.
"I mean, this yak-yak-yakking is for the benefit of the press and the liberals," he yelled into her face, gesturing at the massive p.a. system. The 7-Eleven Slurpee he had shop-lifted along the parade route had turned his teeth purple. "Meanwhile, I hear the White House is surrounded with Metro buses---can you dig it? The cops circled the wagons to try and defend the criminal-in-chief's palace from the voters, man!"
"But you said you never vote!" she yelled back playfully.
"Voting only encourages 'em!" Chris reached up and held her chin with a soft touch that captured her gaze. "Are you with us for what comes next, Donna?"
"Of course!" she replied, as if she knew what he meant. It didn't mater. The eyes behind the Coke-bottle glasses, the soothing voice, the attentive manner---it all combined to stir her awakening sense of drama. As she fell in with Chris' contingent exiting the park, she decided she had not been this excited since Decatur Regional won the state basketball tournament in a double-overtime squeaker the previous Spring.

Ted's car rolled into the summer-hot slime of the nation's capital just after Donna had settled in at the Ellipse. He sniffed out a parking space on a side street a half-mile away with what he credited to north Jersey street smarts, but then asked, "Who's got change for the meter?"
Ralph laughed. "We're here to confront the police state, and you're worried about the meters?"
The Ellipse unfolded before them as a vast sea of humanity moving in eddies and currents along informal corridors. "Like a Matthew Brady civil war scene," Ralph suggested. They settled onto a multi-paneled, rainbow-hued quilt Cindy had brought along. "I've been to enough demonstrations to know they don't have box seats," she explained.
Ronnie remained standing over them. "This is it?"
Her sharp tone caused Ralph to sigh. "Come sit down, sweets," he coaxed her from the quilt. His words felt less than genuine. He'd been thinking exactly what she had voiced. Wish I could remember why I wanted to do this!
"There's supposed to be some really famous people on that stage," Ted told her.
"Too bad we didn't borrow a telescope from the school's observatory to be able see 'em," Angie grumbled.
Ronnie moved closer to the quilt. "Like movie stars and things?"
"I wanna hear the 'things' speak!" Ralph replied. She sneered but then dropped down beside him. He felt like he had plucked her from the sky. It felt good.

Unchallenged, whooping like savages from Saturday morning cartoons, Donna and Chris led the others in vaulting over wooden barricades blocking New York and Pennsylvania avenues. Now she could see the buses---and the cops. Shoving matches quickly sparked like random lightning strikes on a hot night. For the first time she sensed a darker kind of anticipation. She slowed to a walk and became aware of tension in her voice. "What's the plan?"
Chris' shriek rattled her nerves. "It's heave-ho time!"
Donna's gut contracted as Chris scooped a pop bottle from the street and hurled it at the buses, parked nose-to-tail across the avenue. It set off a primal dance among the Milestone kids and others who'd joined them. As they stalked toward the buses, hurling litter, she felt pulled along but flinched with every percussive thunk! of objects striking metal and the high-pitched sound of missiles shattering glass. Another unholy, gangrenous sound finally caused Donna to stop and embrace herself: They're laughing! Her father's voice---the values she thought she had molted like a snake's skin---triggered a wave of nausea.
Chris dashed to her side bearing a choice of cobblestones and wearing the smile of a small child. "Cut this out!" she barked at him..
His expression tempered---the small boy heard mom's admonishing call. "The revolution's at hand, Donna!"
"There's nothing but rocks in yours!"
"You've come so far, baby!" He held the rocks at eye level. "Don't quit now!"
"I-I'm not." She hated the sound of her stammering voice. She took a deep breath---and flinched at the sound of rocks pummeling the buses and the growing, growling mob sound. Looking him in the eye, she said, "This isn't the way!"
He dropped the stones to the street. "You're right." He turned and dashed for the side of the nearest bus, vaulting halfway up the side and hanging on by the windows. "This is he way to do it!"
"Chriiiiiiiiis!"
She dashed past the growing mob, dodging rocks and bottles to reach the bus. He continued to scale it like a cliff face. "Gimme your hand, Donna!"
"No!"
Pulling himself to the roof, Chris turned on his belly. Donna saw excited eyes gleaming at her. "They leave us no option, Donna! Flowers and beads won't change the world!"
"How does this change it?" She was unsure if he heard her above the joyful screams of kids gathering around their first bus capture. She felt as if she were scolding all of them. "What the hell is so important about a bus?"
"It's the drama you crave!" he told her as he raised himself to his knees. "It's right on!"
Chris stood and raised his arms in a boxer's triumphant salute, accepting the shouted cheers of the protesters. The energizing sun blinded her; she saw Chris in silhouette. She stifled a scream as a second shadow materialized behind him. When it raised a baton and bashed Chris across the back of the head, the scream was ripped from her throat. He executed a half-gainer and struck the street on the back of his neck. His body flopped to slow stillness like a beached fish. As she dropped to his side, Donna vaguely sensed the other kids scattering amid terror-filled screams. Sliding her left arm under his head, she cradled it the way she had done when Mother needed help in sitting up in the hospital bed. He had lost his glasses; his face looked peaceful. "This is what you'll look like, sleeping beside me," she told him.
Suddenly, she jerked her arm away, little noticing how his head smacked the asphalt. Blood, torn skin, and the white flotsam of...brain tissue?---the warm mixture lay smeared on her hand and forearm like a child's finger-paints. Romantic fantasy washed away in a flood of revulsion and screams.
A shadow blocked the dappled sun on Chris' pasty face. Donna glanced up as a linebacker-sized cop jerked her to her feet by her left shoulder. The scene leaped into jerky, time-lapse photography. Helmeted, uniformed robots flushed kids from the area. Two of them grabbed Chris by the legs and hauled him off, leaving a scarlet snail-trail on the black surface. She yelled obscenities at the impassive cop, wriggling against his hammerlock until her shoulder burned. A police van's open doors loomed like the horrible jaws of Monstro the Whale. As she braced herself to be fed to it, Donna's cop raised his baton. She whirled to miss his strike and stomped his ankle. A pain-filled shout blasted her ears as he surrendered his grip on her.
She ran, full-tilt, back up New York Avenue, a marathoner fueled by adrenaline and terror.

Angie struggled lazily to his feet. Ragged music from a folk group on the distant stage, Cindy's chattering with a group on another blanket, Ted's snoring from beneath a paper hat he's made from a page of the Washington Post---it was all the tedium he could stand. Ronnie and Ralph, necking on the grass under the summer sunshine, was not exactly quality entertainment, either. Cindy looked up. "I'm going to take a look down front," he told her.
She sneered. "There's no room in the car for those 'new best friends' you like to accumulate."
He pulled himself up to his five-foot-four height. "I'll have you know, I'm a serious political science major assessing the academic climate."
Their banter froze as a first aid team shouldered by. The matronly woman on their stretcher wore a black, ankle-length dress that effectively conveyed mourning for the dead and wounded at Kent State and how dark clothing can hasten heat stroke. Angie felt the day's intent and enthusiasm evaporate. "On second thought, I'm going back to the car and take a nap," he told Cindy.
"Then take the quilt with you," Ronnie called out to him. "We're gonna wake Ted and go find this groovy little neighborhood called Georgetown."

For a fleeting moment Donna imagined herself back in Decatur on a Saturday afternoon, her steps taking her to Daddy's hardware store to walk him home for supper...
Then the side street came back into dizzy focus---more like an alley, really; cars jammed along both curbs in an impatient queue. Bleating sirens and the distant tidal roar of voices rang in her ears to fully chase away the fantasy. The strength in her legs had quit several blocks before; now disoriented, she draped herself across the hood of a powder-blue Mustang. She no longer cared that her hair was tangled and matted, or that her face was a mask of sweat and grime and that her top, panties, and jeans clung to her with the same musky glue. Nor did it matter that she cried shamelessly, tears mixing with sweat as freely as grief mingled with fatigue. She wished only to be in a hot bath, at home, in a long-ago world populated with relationships as simple as her Ken and Barbie dolls.
As she finally forced composure---deep breathing, rubbing self-consciously at the dried brown blood smeared on her forearm---Donna saw them: Parking tickets. Had to be a dozen of them jammed under the driver-side windshield wiper. She burst into riotous laughter---a sound that made her wonder if she'd lost her mind. Then, through her tears, she finally noticed that she was not alone.
"Hi, there!" The short, stocky kid had poked his head through the passenger window like a hand puppet. His twinkling gray eyes showed a mixture of concern, sleep, questions, and the leer Donna had learned to expect from all guys.
She stood straighter and adjusted her top. "You live in this abandoned car?"
The kid neatly vaulted through the window frame and bounded to the pavement. Despite the summery weather he wore black leather boots and a boutique denim jacket over his black tee shirt. "I'm not the one who looks like street people," he grinned.
"I-I've been at the White House," she told him. "At...at the buses."
"The buses..."
Her words bubbled out in a ragged voice, directed at a boy who could no longer hear her. "There must have been more to all of that than throwing rocks at buses!"
"Of course there was."
Donna exhaled a deep breath. The kid's voice was...comforting. Like Mother's soothing voice, assuring her the knee she scraped while trying out new roller skates was not fatal. And then the distant sounds of chanted political slogans and storm-trooper boots against the pavement fractured the memory.
"Do you need to go to a hospital? Find someone?" he asked. "Is that it?"
Hospital. Another mother-memory streaked across Donna's mind, leaving a queasy feeling. "It's my...my boy friend. He got clubbed pretty badly." For the first time she met the gaze of the kid standing beside her. They were kind eyes, after all---blue-gray and sane. She slapped the hood of the car. "Does thing run?"
The kid laughed. "Yeah, it runs." His eyes narrowed. She sensed decisions being made behind them. "You wouldn't have a pencil in your jeans, would you?"
"Isn't that supposed to be my line?"
"I have to leave a message for the guy who owns the car so he doesn't think it's been towed." The kid reached over and grabbed a fistful of pink parking tickets. "Writing a note on the back of a ticket and leaving it spiked to the meter seems appropriate to the tone of the day."

The kid screeched to a halt beside a cop in the first intersection he entered against a red light. "Where they takin' the people who get hurt?" he barked. The cop snapped off a reply and pointed, and the kid floored the car and drove on.
"Christ! You could have grown up in Decatur!" Donna told him.
"Where...?"
"Decatur. This little town between Philly and Allentown, where I grew up. Lots of wise-ass engine men who can hot-wire a car in 30 seconds and drive it under the nose of the boys in blue without dropping the ash off their Marlboros."
"Suppose I told you I know one of your fellow citizens?"
Donna stared hard at him. "Not that I believe you...but who?"
Again, the kid seemed to think things through. He favored her with an aw-shucks smile. "You said...Pennsylvania? Naw, it's Decatur, Illinois I'm thinking of. This is one, ya know."
The car bounced across a manhole cover just then. The rear-view mirror fell into Donna's lap. "Sorry!" the kid chirped and reached for it. Donna snatched it up. She felt him study her harshly. "Don't," he said, and turned back to his driving.
From the moment she had climbed into the car the mirror had tempted her---dared her---to assess the damage. Now she slowly turned it over and blinked into the shiny surface. The pale, grimy face and swollen eyes staring back sent a chill up her spine. A moan escaped her lips. She dropped the mirror to the floor. "At least I'm alive," she said.
The kid rolled to a stop in the semi-circular driveway of the emergency room. "Thanks for the ride," she stuttered as she opened the door.
"Some of us still like to be the white knight." The kid patted the dashboard. "Even if the charger isn't what it used to be. I hope your boy friend's all right."
Standing on the pavement on unsteady legs she closed the door. "Thanks."
"If I were you," he called after her, "I'd slip into the first bathroom I see and make myself look a little less like a grade-B horror film."
"Oh...! The arm. Thanks. I will, uh...Christ! I don't even know your name...!"
"Angie Riccobono. At your service."
"I'm Donna Vincent..."
Again, he flashed a curious grin. "Yeah, I know," he said, and drove away.

Stumbling into the waiting room, Donna was initially confused when the Milestoners honored her with one of the few chairs. It couldn't have been because of her injuries---several of the others looked more ground-up than she felt. Neither did she sense that she was being honored for exploits on the battlefield, either; though some had witnessed how she had comforted Chris and escaped, she could see that they wondered where she had been for the last hour. Then they asked her how doctors could contact Chris' family and she finally understood the deal: They were grooming her to The Grieving Widow in their morality play. It was such an oddly old-fashioned touch from a group that claimed to disdain tradition that Donna almost laughed.
Almost. Because Donna also decided that just as she was accepted as a tried-by-fire radical, she no longer desired it.
A white-jacketed doctor strode into the waiting room just then. He took a long moment to survey the group before sharing the news he said he had just delivered to Chris' parents, in Toledo. Donna didn't hear him. She was thinking about her mother again---and finally understood why. She blinked and looked around the room when a sudden silence distracted her. The doc, the kids, the police officers who had materialized at the doors...she had apparently been given the floor but because she had not been listening, had no idea what was expected of her. It didn't matter.
"I watched my mother die. I was 14," she said. "Daddy dragged me to a hospital very much like this one every single evening towards the end. I remember the hospital room smelled like disinfectant, which I called 'death smells.' Daddy sat there holding her hand, dozing of every now and then 'cause Mom was pretty much out of it at this point. After awhile I learned to imagine it was Saturday morning when I was really small and I would sneak into their bedroom and cuddle between them under the blankets. I sat in the hospital room and told them 'It's just like that now!'...but they were asleep and couldn't hear, and besides...it wasn't like that anymore."
Donna felt tears roll from her eyes. She willed her voice to remain calm.
"The night the end came...I never understood how Daddy knew. He jumped up and ran to the doorway and screamed for a doctor. He looked like Olive Oyl screaming for Popeye. They all came running but it was over at last. He held Mom for a long time and kept telling me to kiss her good-bye but he didn't notice when I left the room full of death smells because I just couldn't take it."
Donna saw the shock and horror she expected on each face. She was pleased when she also saw the same plea for understanding she had felt all afternoon.
"Despite the waste of her death, Mom had a pretty good life. She packed a lot into it. She and Daddy grew up together and married and had some time for themselves before they settled down to have me and my sister. She left behind two kids and a pretty neat man who loved her a lot and still does. Really cornball. But what Mom and Daddy had is what attracted me to Chris' revolution, too---caring people making the most of the time they have with one another. Working to leave behind a slightly better world. We're more cornball than we want to believe.
"So now I've witnessed two people close to me die and the principal difference is that when Mom died, she had something to show for her life."
Donna sat back, wheezing as her aching muscles resettled themselves. "I hope to God that what we've done today isn't the best we can do."

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