23 
Peter Douglass and Denny practically dragged us through the mayhem, which was undulating like a mess of fish caught in a net. Somehow we broke out of the mass of bodies and kept going, trampling through bushes lining the walks until we’d put a hundred feet between us and the plaza and felt grass beneath our feet.
We turned back. A small riot was going on. People yelling, shoving, fists flying. The White Pride contingent was holding its own, mostly stiff-arming any students who came near their “leader,” though a couple of the skinhead-types got into it with some Latino students. A campus police car drove straight up one of the walks, siren wailing; another arrived from a different direction. Cops spilled out of the cars; police bullhorns ordered everyone to break it up. People began to run in all directions, like water finding its way out the holes of a sieve.
“Ben!” I cried. “Where’s Ben Garfield? He was with me! He tried to help me!” Suddenly I panicked, more scared than when Josh and I had fallen in the middle of the crowd. “Oh Jesus! Don’t let anything happen to—”
“Look. There’s Dr. Smith.” Josh pointed. As the plaza emptied, Mark could be seen talking to one of the campus police, gesturing, looking around, while the other cops snapped handcuffs on the two skinhead guys and four or five students.
The big bully in dreads was nowhere to be seen.
“Denny! We’ve got to find Ben! And what happened to Carl? . . . Oh!” From the far side of the Rock, we could see Carl Hickman and Ben Garfield skirting a row of bridalwreath bushes and heading our way. Ben’s hat was askew, and Carl had him firmly by the arm as if to steady him, but otherwise he looked unharmed.
“Ben!” As the two men joined our little knot on the grass, I threw my arms around Ruth’s husband and started to cry.
Embarrassed, Ben patted me awkwardly; then he looked Josh up and down. “You two all right?”
I didn’t know how to answer. As realization sank in that all of us were safe, so did awareness of my hands and knees, which were starting to sting like fiery nettles. And my shoulder . . . that was going to be sore. I nodded and squeaked, “You?”
“Who, me?” he guffawed. “Not a scratch. Except for the heart attack when Mr. Tough Guy pushed you down. Would’ve tackled the big jerk myself, except Superhero Hickman here whisked me away so fast I have windburn on my schnoz.”
We couldn’t help but laugh. Ben’s nose was indeed a mottled red, though I doubted it was windburn.
The plaza around the Rock had almost emptied. The campus police who remained after the arrests were having heated words with the White Pride people. The spokesman in the black tie held his chin up, lips tight, as if refusing to answer or get drawn into a debate, while the young guy in the red tie packed up the bullhorn in its case. Mark stooped and picked up something from the ground, then trotted our way.
His face was a road map of consternation. “What happened? Are you guys OK? I thought I had everybody’s attention, and then—balloey!” Mark held out Josh’s limp backpack. “What happened to this? Where are the books?”
Josh shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and hunched his shoulders. “Uh, some brawny dude, one of the NU students, I think, jerked it off my shoulder, the books fell out, and . . .” His shoulders sagged. “Guess the rest is history. I’m really sorry, Dr. Smith.”
Mark rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Should’ve known. Black kid? Dreads? That’s Matt Jackson. Weightlifter, Wildcats linebacker, third-year student. A fight looking for a place to happen. Should’ve talked with him beforehand, might’ve—”
He stopped midsentence. A group of White Pride people were coming our way, their mission accomplished. We all fell silent. They passed by silently, as if we were invisible. The young man in the red tie and his girlfriend, I assumed, brought up the rear. I didn’t know where to look; I didn’t want to provoke anything by staring. But as the girl came near, she caught my eye. My heart softened. I wanted to cry out, “What is your name? I want to pray for you!” Our glance held for only a second, and then she looked away.
The young man in the red tie let go of her hand, deliberately stepped close to Mark, muttered something under his breath, and then hustled after his group.
We all stared at Mark. “What did he say?” Denny demanded.
“Nothing.”
Mark’s mouth twisted slightly. “He said, ‘We know where you live.’ ”
BY THE TIME WE PULLED INTO THE GARAGE, I was a wreck. All the things that happened at the Rock, that could’ve happened, slid into my imagination like a mudslide loosened by the respite of the ride home. Even Denny was tight-lipped. I could see it in his eyes, mentally kicking himself that he didn’t protect his wife and son. Josh brushed off any concerns, even though he had a bump above one eye where he hit the plaza bricks. “Hey, I fell on top of mom. Soft landing,” he joked. But he went into his room and shut the door, and we didn’t see him again for a couple of hours.
Amanda was talking on the phone—surprise, surprise—but actually hung up when we came in the house. “Hey. How’d it go?” she chirped.
I left Amanda to Denny and went into our bedroom, crawled under our wedding-ring quilt, and had a good bawl. Not sure what I was crying about. Delayed reaction to being scared out of my wits. Anger. Confusion. All of the above.
I heard the door open. “Jodi?” Denny’s voice. “You OK?”
I poked my head out from under the quilt. “Yeah.” I grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and blew my nose. “Just a little shaken.”
“Um, it’s almost seven. Mind if I order a pizza?”
“Whatever. Sure, fine.”
The door closed.
He obviously didn’t want to talk about it right now. Maybe I could talk to Avis. Or Florida. Both their husbands had been there. They’d surely heard all about the rally by now. They’d understand. I found the bedroom extension on the floor under Denny’s dirty sweats, punched the On button, and actually got a dial tone instead of Amanda. “The age of miracles has not passed,” I muttered and punched in Avis’s number.
No answer. I dialed Florida.
“Jodi? Girl, Carl and Peter just been tellin’ Avis and me what happened at that rally—”
“Avis?”
“Yeah. She’s here. Avis! It’s Jodi. Get on the other phone.”
Avis picked up. For some reason I started to blubber and found myself replaying the whole no-good, terrible, rotten day. Thinking God wanted me to go to the rally. Sloshing coffee all over Denny’s pants. Being late to school. Denny’s flat tire and the grease stain on his other pants. The rally, the bullhorn, the bully, the spilled books . . .
“I am so mad at Josh for buying those stupid books in the first place. And I’m mad at Mark for giving them back to him at the rally, for heaven’s sake!” I rushed on, spilling out my anger at the NU student who mistook Josh for a skinhead white supremacist and pushed him around. “We ended up being in danger, not from the hate group, but from the students we came to support! Didn’t even give Josh a chance to—”
“Girl!” Florida interrupted my volcanic flow. “That’s what them hate groups do. Get folks all riled up, try to divide people, then sit back and watch the fireworks. I mean, you can pretty much guarantee a race riot if some white guy starts calling blacks and Latinos ‘inferior’ and ‘mud races’—even the N-word, you said. On their own college campus!”
“Jodi?” Avis’s voice sounded tinny on the extension. “What did you mean, God wanted you to go to the rally?”
“Not so sure now,” I sniffled. “In the middle of the night, I thought He was telling me to go, you know, to pray. But—”
“Did you pray at the rally?”
“Well, yeah, sorta. There was this girl with the White Pride group, couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. She looked scared, as if she didn’t really want to be there. So I started praying for her. But, well, next thing I knew I was on the ground about to get stepped on.”
“Jodi.” Avis’s voice got stronger. “Don’t you see? God did send you to the rally to pray for that girl! But of course Satan didn’t like it. Everything that happened today—from spilling your coffee to the flat tire to the football player mistaking Josh for a skinhead—was part of the spiritual battle going on. Even the books last night—and I’m not blaming Josh; he had good intentions—got us distracted from the business of prayer.”
“You sayin’ it now, Avis,” Florida chimed in. “That devil, he one tricky dude. He got all sorts of distractions to keep us from doin’ business in the spirit realm.”
“I just want to encourage you, Jodi.” Avis’s words reached out to me like a warm hug. “You were obedient, and God is going to bless your prayer for that girl. I’m glad you and Josh weren’t seriously hurt, though I know it had to be frightening. I think—when is our next Yada Yada meeting? We need to do some serious study about preparing ourselves for spiritual warfare. This is just the beginning.”
I lay on the bed after we hung up, thinking about what Avis said. If I was obedient and had done what God wanted me to do, then maybe I was focusing too much on the negative stuff. After all, there were many things we could praise God for. Neither Josh nor I had actually gotten hurt. Just a scrape or two. Ben Garfield was OK. Mark had stood up to the White Pride guy in a classy way. He’d showed their rhetoric for what it was: lies and more lies. Peter Douglass and Carl Hickman had looked out for us, and Ben Garfield had come to our rescue . . .
I sat up. Wow. In the middle of a hate rally that nearly turned into a race riot, God had knit together the hearts of friends. Jew. Gentile. Black. White. Just like Peter Douglass had said last night at the Sisulu-Smiths: “This isn’t about race or color—not in God’s eyes.” It made me feel—
Hungry.
Ravenous.
I jumped off the bed and flung open the door. “Hey, Denny! Has that pizza arrived yet?”
JOSH CAME OUT OF HIS ROOM long enough to help himself to his share of the large Gino’s pizza—half spicy sausage, half pepperoni, mushrooms, extra cheese. “Uh, can I use the car tonight?” He jangled his keys in one hand, and held a slice of pizza in the other.
“Where are you going?” I frowned at the bruise over his eye.
He shrugged. “I dunno. Just feel jumpy. Want to get out for a while.”
I knew Denny didn’t like “destination unknown” any more than I did. But he growled, “OK.” Tonight wasn’t the night to get tight about the rules. Except—
“Wait a minute, Josh.” I ran to get the alarm clock I’d bought after Avis told me about setting an alarm for curfew. “Shut this off when you get in tonight,” I told him. “You don’t have to knock on our door.”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “And if it rings before I get in?”
“Grounded!” Amanda crowed. She was enjoying this.
Josh started to roll his eyes, but I jumped in. “It’s mostly for me, Josh, so I don’t lie awake worrying till you’re home safe. I’ll set it for fifteen minutes after your curfew to give you some leeway—and you can always call if you need more time. Just so we know.”
“Whatever.” The back screen door banged behind him as he went out.
The phone rang as Denny and Amanda divided the last of the pizza. “I’ll get it!” Amanda jumped up, sucking pizza sauce off her fingers as she dashed for the phone. A moment later she was back, her face wrinkled in a frown. “For Dad.” She handed the phone to Denny and whispered to me, “Sounds like Nony Sisulu-Smith, but she asked for Dad.”
My ears perked up.
Denny listened a moment. “No, not since we left the rally . . . He said he was going back to his office for a while . . . Don’t worry about us, Nony; we’re fine . . . Yeah, it got a little rowdy, but . . . No, they didn’t stick around either . . . By the way, Mark handled the situation very well. You would’ve been proud of him.” He laughed. “Hey. Tell those two young rascals Mr. Denny says, ‘Get in that bed!’ . . . Don’t worry, Nony. He probably turned off his cell and forgot to turn it on again . . . OK, then.”
Denny came back to the table and reached for the last piece of pizza. “Nony. She’s worried. Mark’s not home yet and it’s past the boys’ bedtime, and he’s not answering his cell.”
JOSH’S “CURFEW ALARM” didn’t awaken me, but the phone did.
Riiing . . . riiing . . . riiing . . . riiing—
I fumbled in the dark, practically lying across Denny to reach the phone on his side of the bed. He grunted in his sleep. The glowing red digits on the bedside clock said 12:35.
Grr. If this was Josh asking to stay out later—
“Hello?”
“Jodi . . .” The voice on the other end broke and began to cry. Female. Accent.
“Nony? Nony! What’s the matter? Are you OK?”
Denny rose up on one elbow and leaned an ear close to the phone.
“Jodi.” Nony’s voice was barely a whisper. “Can you and Denny come? Right away! The police . . . the police just left. One of our neighbors found Mark . . . badly beaten . . . behind our garage. They took him to Evanston Hospital. He’s unconscious . . . maybe lying there for hours. Oh, please. Come quickly!”