“Yeah, those pigs move faster than you’d think with those stumpy little legs of theirs!” I yell.
Floyd laughs. Behind us, Tom chortles as he pants to keep up.
I glance back over my shoulder. All I see behind my friends is chaos. Everyone’s scrambling to get away from the police, tripping over roots and rocks.
Now that we’ve reached the trees, there are only a handful of officers left in the pack. The rest must have stayed back by the rally at the band shell. There were still plenty of people to club there.
It’s been like this all week. My friends and I drove in from New York on Friday, and ever since, we’ve been running. Thousands of us are in Chicago protesting at the Democratic National Convention — it was the one real chance we might have had to stop the war in Vietnam — but to the police, “protest” means “time to beat people over the head.”
“Look out!” Tom shouts. Diane, Floyd, and I duck just in time. A rock sails over my head.
“What the hell?” Diane yells, looking behind us. A hippie wearing an Indian headband sees us and shrugs.
“Shit, sorry, sister,” the hippie calls. “I was aiming for the pigs.”
“What pigs?” I look ahead to where the hippie is pointing. Two cops are running, dodging through the trees toward a group of boys who look like they might still be in junior high school. The boys are yelling insults at the cops and holding handkerchiefs over their faces.
“Hey!” I shout to the police. “Don’t you have anything better to do than beat up on little kids?”
The officers ignore me, but the boys look my way. The cops see that they’re distracted and move faster, lifting their clubs to strike. The boys turn to run, the police hard on their heels.
I had to open my big mouth.
“Shit,” Floyd says. The boys and the officers run behind a cluster of trees and out of sight. We all slow to a stop except Diane. She takes off for the edge of the trees, her light-brown braid bouncing. For a second I think she’s going after them, but then she trots back toward us.
“The kids got away,” she reports. “The pigs moved on to somebody else.”
“Well, isn’t this just swell.” Floyd drops my hand and runs his fingers through his long blond hair, his eyes sweeping across the crowded park. The officers who were chasing us must have gone off after someone else too. The only police I can see now are walking toward the outskirts of the park or back to the rally site.
Grant Park is huge, sprawling along the shore of Lake Michigan. The band shell where our rally just ended is at the north end of the park, but the cops chased us south, toward the bridges that connect the park to the rest of the city. I wonder how many people are still at the band shell now that the afternoon sun is starting to get low. The protest leaders said we were at least five thousand strong today.
“What the hell was that about?” Floyd says. “I know the pigs don’t need an excuse, but come on, it was a damn peace rally.”
“Something happened at the flagpole.” Tom tries to put his arm around Diane’s shoulders, but she shakes him off. “Some dude tried to take down the flag, or burn it, or something, so the bastards came down on all of us.”
“And then they went ape,” Diane says. She’s talking to Tom but looking at me. She’s watched me like an obsessive hawk ever since I took up with Floyd. I knew she would, but I didn’t know how guilty it would make me feel.
“Are they still having the march?” I ask Tom. He’s an officer in Students for a Democratic Society, so he’s plugged in with the marshals who are organizing the protests. “Or did the pigs make them cancel?”
“People are still lining up on Columbus, but they don’t have a permit yet,” Tom says. “They say they’re going all the way to the Amphitheatre to protest the peace plank getting voted down.”
We all look down. We’d been so sure the plank would pass. I didn’t want to believe there are people who don’t want the war to end, but I guess there are, and I guess a lot of them are Democratic delegates.
They’ve been voting all day at the Amphitheatre, five miles south of the park. That’s where the actual convention is happening. The delegates are shuttling back and forth from the Amphitheatre to the glittering hotels lined up on the other side of Michigan Avenue. Hiding in their sky-high penthouse suites, it’s easy for them to pretend we don’t matter. Even though we’re shouting right under their feet.
“Let’s go,” Floyd says. “I’ll show those pigs at the Amphitheatre where they can stick their peace plank.”
Diane rolls her eyes, but Floyd doesn’t see her. She’s never thought much of Floyd. To be honest, neither had I. Not until a few weeks ago.