I decided it would be better for me to be out of town for a few days. Besides, I had some of my Regional Traveler work to do for the Organization. I took a notebook, some GUARDIANS and even some RED BALOONS and started hitching south. I got a ride in an old car with a poor man and his wife and four children. After about fifty miles we stopped at a gas station. A highway patrol car was parked at the station. When we got gasoline and cokes and everybody peed, we got back in and headed south again. After a few miles, the highway patrol car was coming after us with the siren going. The car I was in pulled over. The highway patrolman came up to the car. The driver held out his license and said in a nervous voice, "We wasn’t speeding officer." The highway patrolman said in a loud voice, "Dale Fields, come on out of there!" 
     I did so. 
     He poked at my thigh with his club and said, "Get your legs further apart or I’ll give you some of this stick on your head!" 
I got my legs as far apart as I could, until the muscles were trembling. He frisked me. Then he said, "All right, show me your ID." 
I pulled out my draft card and showed it to him. Then he said, "OK, Dale, you can get back in." 
     I got back in the car and we drove off. The highway patrol did a U-turn across the median strip and headed in the opposite direction from us. He just wanted me to know that they knew who I was and they were watching me and they would get me someday when they got the orders. 
I hitched on south. I stopped at a couple of Organization chapters, and visited with the few people who were still around for the summer and gave them some literature. They talked about what political work they were doing and even more about their tangled love affairs and small-time pot dealing. 
     Then I hitched on to the big university town, 300 miles south of the campus town where I stayed at Clu’s. This was Bump’s home town, with a big, active Organization chapter. They called it the Cowboy Berkeley. It was very late and I went to the prayer chapel of the Baptist Student Center - it was open all night and there were soft wine-red cushions to sleep on. 
I woke up the next day and walked a half block onto College Avenue, in front of the university. It was Saturday morning and there were young people in raggedy get-ups of every description out hustling for their breakfast. Some of them as you could see from back-packs or rolled-up sleeping bags, had just arrived like me and they had slept the night before under a bush in the park. Some people had their hands out panhandling, others would sidle up to you if they knew who you were and thought you were cool and ask if you wanted to buy a match box of pot. And there was one guy singing, playing his guitar and his case open on the sidewalk for people to throw coins in. There was at least one of these on College Avenue every day. 
     But the best way of scuffling up money for breakfast was to sell the ARMADILLO TIMES. The ARMADILLO TIMES was one of the oldest underground papers in the US - nearly a year old. It was the same kind of deal as the GUARDIAN - sell the ARMADILLO TIMES at fifteen cents a copy and keep a nickel. I went over to Mark at the corner with his stack of ARMADILLO TIMES on the sidewalk under a brick. I checked out twenty papers - which would be a dollar for me, enough for a hamburger and a coke. He checked my name and the number of papers I took and I went down the sidewalk whooping, "ARMADILLO TIMES!" A lot of the vendors had their own songs and calls. 
     It was early and the ARMADILLO TIMES sold well even in the summer with fewer students around. Pretty soon I was sold out and I turned the paper’s share of the money in to Mark. He was a shaggy haired character of twenty-eight - middle aged. I ate and checked out ten more papers from him and went out again. Now there were more vendors out, so they would sell slower. People usually didn’t try to sell the ARMADILLO TIMES very far from the campus area, because then the cops hassled you. A few teenagers had taken the paper to sell at their high schools the previous spring and got expelled for it. 
By now I had had my breakfast and I was just coasting. College Avenue was the place where whoever I might want to meet would show up sooner or later. As the day went on, G.I.’s started showing up from Fort Holden, the army post fifty miles north. They had mustaches and sideburns as long as they could get away with. Some had peace medallions around their necks. They were always likely to buy the ARMADILLO TIMES because they knew it was for pot and against the war. I copied the other vendors and shouted "FTA" when I sold a paper to G.I.’s. They shouted back "All the way!" and raised their fingers in the V-sign. FTA stood for Fuck The Army. 
     Then here came Glen Medard and his wife Miriam - members of the Organization and very openly - the Communist Party. They were also involved to an extent in the Interstate Chapter’s business, but Bump warned me, "Don’t ever tell them all you know. The Party wants to have a foothold in everything." They were very special friends of his, but because they were in the Party, he couldn’t completely trust them, no matter how much he might want to. 
     The Communist Party was the great-great-grandma of all the various Vanguards, including Clu’s Vanguard, that were competing for the salvation of our political souls. 
     The Vanguards had all split from the Party and cursed it for selling out the Revolution, but the Party kept lumbering on. Actually up until the past few years the Party had been declining in numbers, becoming the old folks’ home of the Left, so they rejoiced when young people like Glen and Miriam, who were no older than I was, started joining as radicalization increased. 
     Glen was a well-built guy with a sweeping dark mustache. That was still a little bit daring in 1967 among some of the people he frequented, but other than that, he wore slacks and a blue sport shirt - not like the freaks on College Avenue. His hair, like my own, was only beginning to get long. He helped put together student support for a Chicano farm workers’ strike and he had led a strike at a restaurant that was popular with the students. That strike turned into a pitched battle with fraternity students strike breakers. He had punched a cop there who had grabbed Miriam by the neck. Now he was the Party’s contact with local black, Chicano and labor union leaders. 
     Miriam - there was something kind of freaky about her without trying. She was tall and thin and very pale, with long pale-gold hair. She had large prominent blue-green eyes. One eye always seemed to be looking a different angle from the other, but above all, she had a big long-toothed grin that said, "Wow, dig it!" 
     The Medards were very popular with most of the people in the local chapter of the Organization, who might snicker at the current state of the Communist Party - but Glen and Miriam brought to mind all the romanticized memories of the tough brave Party people in the union struggles of the thirties. A lot of people in the Organization and its hippie fringe told their deepest personal problems to Miriam. She also had a circle of friends among the prominent liberals of the city - including a couple of state legislators that she sold pot to. 
     (The Communist Party was officially opposed to Marijuana, just like Clu’s Vanguard, but, well - so was the state legislature.) 
     When I saw the Medards, I had sold seven papers, enough for a large coke. I took the other three back to Mark with his share of the money and went with Glen and Miriam to the Last Chance, a cafe that operated in the university student union. The Last Chance’s specialty was enchiladas embalmed in grease. I got a large coke and the Medards got an enchilada plate and shared it with me. 
     First we went through some Interstate Chapter business. I wrote the word PACKAGES in my notebook - that meant draft dodgers, deserters, any kind of fugitives. Underneath that I scribbled a few things from our conversation. Interstate stuff was over quickly and Miriam asked, "What’s going on with the G.I.’s at Fort Clay?" 
     So I said, "Well, Bump came through a few days ago to ask me the same thing." 
     "Far out!" she shouted. "No one here has heard a thing about Bump in a long time except he was at the Organization’s Convention." Before she married Glen, Miriam had a big crush on Bump. He was the one who got her into the Organization. 
     I went on to tell about Pete Yoder’s court martial and the bullets found on Will’s bed and his new court martial. I told a little of my personal impression of Will, the intensity and simplicity of his presence. Other than that, everything I said was in a new article I had written for the GUARDIAN. I didn’t feel like telling them more - not just Will’s story, but I wasn’t going to tell them about the Barrage and Jim Ed and Jan - the whole scene there. I wasn’t going to make it easier for the Communist Party to do their thing in Pronghorn. Let the Party find out stuff its own self. One of the saddest things about groups like the Party and the Vanguard was the barrier they put to trust in a movement that had been built on friendship. Thoughts like that took me away from my body sitting at the table in the Last Chance for a few seconds. 
     "The Organization here is getting more and more literature out to the G.I.’s at Fort Holden," Glen’s voice brought me back with a clunk. "And you saw for yourself how they snap up the ARMADILLO TIMES." 
     "Well is he or isn’t he?" a voice spoke from beside our table. A young man was standing there with a long pinkish sandy beard on the tip of his chin that looked like a big shaving brush. He wore a blue Chinese cap like the one Mao Ze Dong wore, and a jeans jacket, not the shaped western kind, but one that looked like a giant bag for carrying books, out of which his legs were sticking in corduroy pants almost worn through at the knees. 
     On the pocket of the jeans jacket was a red IWW button. 
This was Drake Loupess who did a lot of the work putting together the ARMADILLO TIMES. He who might be or might not be, was Robert Kennedy. Would he run for president in 1968? The rumors were getting stronger and stronger. The Communist Party was the only left-wing group that would support him if he did. Drake was trying to needle Glen about it, the way he tried to needle everybody at times. 
     Most of us on the Left felt that either Bobby Kennedy was a fraud who would not end the war if he was elected or he was a wishful thinker who would be unable to end it because the Pentagon, the CIA, etc. were too strong. As for the Communist Party? Miriam was on the twelve-member National Council of the Party’s youth group. The other eleven council members were all in the greater New York City area, close to Party headquarters where they could be watched. 
     The Party’s youth group would not officially admit that it was the Party’s youth group. It was supposed to be open to all socialist-minded young people. So Bump had showed up at their convention and tried to pass a resolution condemning Robert Kennedy for trying to prosecute the Communist Party when he was Attorney General. The Communist Party people running that convention tried to squelch the resolution (they knew that when the time came they would be campaigning for Robert Kennedy). But as you have seen by now, it would be very hard to squelch Bump. He strode out of their convention hall making enough noise to sound like the walk-out of a whole bloc of delegates. 
     Whether or not you agree that this little story shows that the Communist Party made trust difficult, you will probably agree that people - Communist or otherwise - get tired of being needled, and Drake Loupess had been doing this pretty steadily to Glen ever since he joined the Party. 
     "Look Loupess, I’m sick of all these rich kids objections to tactical support of Bobby Kennedy!" Glen exploded. "Even if he can’t end the war, it’s better to have him try than have Johnson escalate it. Workers shouldn’t have to be pure enough to satisfy you! They shouldn’t have to wait for the revolution to try to have the nice houses, the nice cars, the motor cycles, the stereos, the meat, the potatoes, the dope!" 
     Drake shrugged his shoulders and went off. A young man had been waiting for Glen’s blow up to end and now he walked up to our table. He was tall and slim and slightly stooped over with a gaunt, strong face that could have been twenty-seven but was actually seventeen. He wore a red-brown beret from which his smoothly combed chestnut hair fell to dangle in his right eye. Just as Drake wore a bulky jeans jacket in summer, this youth wore a pale tan bush jacket with four large pockets. He was one of the teenagers who came to the student union to sell match boxes of pot, which he kept in these pockets and he went around checking out the tables with the knees of his long legs bent as he walked and his big feet in their motorcycle boots at about a 45 degree angle. 
     "Hello Les," Glen said. A smile lighted up under his mustache. 
     "Hey Glen and Miriam - and wow, it’s Dale!" he said. 
     Lester Olin slid rather awkwardly into the seat because of his long legs, bumping the table. But his face worked itself into a big grin of welcome. 
     I had met Les, about five months before. I went with Glen to the apartment building where Les lived, to pick him up. He was working with Glen at a warehouse. Most of the people in the local chapter of the Organization were pretty upset with Les. He had been expected to go as a delegate to the Organization’s winter conference out on the West Coast and the chapter chipped in to give him money for the journey. Then he didn’t go to the conference. He took their money and partied. But Glen and Miriam were still friendly with him. They didn’t know that I had talked over some Interstate things with him that I had never mentioned to them. He did a few missions for Interstate. 
     "Hey! I think I see somebody over there," Les said, struggling up and bumping his knees on the table again. "See y’all in a second," and he hurried across the Last Chance floor with his stoop-shouldered bent-knee walk to the booth of a potential customer. 
     "I went over by Les’s place the other day," Glen said, "while Les was gone. That creep Rollo Zane came walking out of there. I just turned around and went the other way. He’ll have all those kids that live there dead or in jail some day." 
     I had heard this one before. Rollo Zane had been the ringleader of a group of right-wing ROTC students. They were out there throwing eggs at Glen and Miriam and other Organization people the year before when the Organization chapter had a picket line in front of a restaurant that still refused to serve blacks almost two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed. Later Rollo’s troops had attacked an anti-war demonstration. But everybody was radicalizing in those days and so did Rollo. Now every issue of the ARMADILLO TIMES had a long letter from Rollo about how much more revolutionary he was than anybody in the Organization. Instead of ROTC students, his followers were now young people in the chapter’s hippie fringe. He was also a supplier of methamphetamine hydrochlorate-crystal - which gave him some popularity among the fringe youth. The chapter didn’t like this, but with so many people dealing a little pot on the side, who could afford to say much about it openly? 
     Les made his sale and came back over to our table. "Say, Les," I said. "I need a place to stay for the night. Can I come over to your place?" 
"Sure," Les said. "But I gotta go now. I got one last match box to get rid of. I’ll see you at my pad at sundown."