4) Throughout the summer and fall of that year, as Ferguson put in his hours for Mr. Mangini and pondered the uncertain future that lay before him, a man was setting off bombs around New York City. Sam Melville, or Samuel Melville, had been born Samuel Grossman in 1934, but he had changed his name in honor of the man who wrote Moby-Dick, or else in honor of the French film director Jean-Pierre Melville, who himself had been born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, or else in honor of no one and for no reason at all, except perhaps to disassociate himself from his father and his father’s name. An independent Marxist allied to the Weathermen and the Black Panthers but essentially working on his own (sometimes with an accomplice or two, most often not), Melville planted his first bomb on July twenty-seventh, damaging the structure of Grace Pier on the New York waterfront, an installation owned by the United Fruit Company, the age-old exploiter of downtrodden peasants in Central and South America. On August twentieth, he attacked the Marine Midland Bank Building; on September nineteenth, the offices of the Department of Commerce and the Army Inspector General in the Federal Office Building on lower Broadway. Subsequent targets included the Standard Oil offices in the RCA Building, the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank, and, on November eleventh, the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue, but the following day, when Melville went to bomb the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street, where the Panther 21 trial was being held, he made the error of choosing an F.B.I. informant as his accomplice and was nabbed on the spot. He wound up in the Tombs in April 1970, where he organized a strike among the prisoners, which led to his transfer to Sing Sing in July, where he organized another prison strike, which led to another transfer in September to one of the maximum-security facilities in upstate New York, Attica.
By all accounts, Melville’s growing radicalism had been spurred by the events at Columbia in the spring of 1968. On the night of the April thirtieth bust, the thirty-four-year-old ex — plumbing designer turned up on campus to lend his support to the students, and in the mayhem of one thousand swarming T.P.F. grunts and seven hundred arrested students and the innumerable assaults on the green-bands and white-bands, Melville urged the students to push back and fight the police. With a small gang of protesters, he started hauling fifty-gallon garbage cans made of tempered, vulcanized steel to the roof of Low Library to drop down on the cops below. The younger students were afraid, not at all prepared to take part in such a reckless action, and scattered into the night. Before long, Melville was discovered by the police and dragged into another building, where they pounded him with clubs and left him tied to a chair. Some days after that, he joined up with the local Community Action Committee (C.A.C.), a group opposed to Columbia’s policy of evicting poor tenants from university-owned buildings, and at one of the C.A.C. demonstrations in front of the St. Marks Arms on West 112th Street, he was arrested along with several other members of the group.
Columbia had lit the fire in him, and by the next year he had begun his bombing campaign throughout the city. So skillfully did he pull off the first attacks that he remained at large for three and a half months, undetected and untraceable. The tabloids called him the Mad Bomber.
Ferguson had never met Sam Melville and had no idea who he was until his arrest on November twelfth, but their stories crossed with the fourth and most destructive of the eight bombings, crossed in such a way as to alter the direction of Ferguson’s life, for it was all but certain that the fit and healthy college graduate would have been classified 1-A by his draft board, which would have opened the path to a trial in federal court and a term in federal prison, but when Melville blew up the Army Induction Center on Whitehall Street in early October, Ferguson still had not received any word about his classification, and when no word came for the rest of that month, nor any word throughout November, Ferguson cautiously advanced the theory that his army records had been destroyed by Melville’s bomb, that he was, as he liked to say to himself, off the books.
In other words, if Ferguson was indeed off the books, then Sam Melville had saved his life. The so-called Mad Bomber had saved his life along with the lives of hundreds if not thousands of others, and then Melville had sacrificed his own life by going to prison for them.
5) Or so Ferguson imagined, or so he hoped, or so he prayed was true, but whether he was off the books or not, there was still one more bridge to cross before the matter could be settled. Nixon had changed the law. The Selective Service System would no longer be depending on the entire pool of American men between eighteen and twenty-six to fill the ranks of the army but only on some of them, the ones who would be assigned the lowest numbers in the new draft lottery, which would be held on Monday, December first. Three hundred and sixty-six possible numbers, one for every day of the year including leap year, one for the birthday of every young man in the United States, a blind draw of numbers that would tell you whether you were free or not free, whether you were going off to fight or staying home, whether you were going to prison or not going to prison, the whole shape of your future life to be sculpted by the hands of General Pure Dumb Luck, commander of urns, coffins, and all national graveyards.
Absurd.
The country had been transformed into a casino, and you weren’t even allowed to roll the dice for yourself. The government would be rolling them for you. Anything below eighty or a hundred would spell danger. Anything above would spelclass="underline" Thank you, massuh.
The number for March third was 263.
No exaltation this time, no thunderbolt or electric current in his veins, no purple crocus jutting through the blackened snow, but a sudden feeling of calm, perhaps even resignation, perhaps even sadness. He had been ready to do the defiant thing he had promised to do, and now he didn’t have to do it anymore. He didn’t even have to think about it anymore. Stand up and breathe, stand up and move around, stand up and take in the world, and as Ferguson stood up and breathed and moved around and took in the world, he understood that he had been living in a state of paralysis for the past five months.
Father, he said to himself, my strange, dead father, your boy will not be going to live behind bars. Your boy is free to go wherever he wants. Pray for your boy, father, just as he prays for you.
Ferguson sat back down at his desk and scanned the newspaper for June sixteenth, Noah’s birthday.
Number 274.
And then Howard’s, which was January twenty-second.
Number 337.
Late the following afternoon, Noah hitched a ride down from New Haven, and at seven o’clock Ferguson and Howard met him at the West End to begin the evening with a round of drinks before going off to a celebratory Chinese dinner at the Moon Palace, just two blocks south on Broadway. Feeling comfortable in their front corner booth, however, they lingered at the West End and never made it to the restaurant, dining on their favorite bar’s abominable pot roast and noodles and then staying on until two-thirty in the morning as they slurped down vast quantities of alcohol in several of its best known forms, mostly scotch for Ferguson, mediocre blended scotch that led him on a bumpy ride to the nethermost bowels of drunkenness, but until he dissolved into a slurry, blotto, double-visioned torpor and was lugged by his two wobbling companions back to Howard and Amy’s apartment on West 113th Street, where he spent the early morning hours passed out on the sofa, he remembered that Howard and Noah had ganged up on him at one point and had criticized him for a number of things, some of which he could still remember, some of which he couldn’t, but among those he could remember were the following: