The Revolution Betrayed

A Short Story

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Author’s Note

I well remember those days of revolutionary rage that commenced in the Sixties. They ended, more or less, in the mid-Seventies and now they belong to history. But those days have been much on my mind recently as I contemplate the possibility that America is headed for another such time of troubles. My sense that there is nothing more futile in the long run than revolutionary terrorism led me, some years ago, to write The Revolution Betrayed, and this seems an opportune moment to share it here on Substack.

“The Revolution Betrayed” is included in my first short story collection, A Cold Day in August: Thirteen Tales of Criminality Most Foul, which is available on Amazon as a Kindle edition and a paperback edition. If you read and enjoy this story, I hope you’ll share it with family and friends, and perhaps even go on to read the other tales that comprise A Cold Day in August.

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The Revolution Betrayed

A Short Story by Thomas Gregg

The trip up from Union was punctuated by Diana’s complaints.

“You don’t have to do this,” she insisted to Brian as they crossed the state line from Massachusetts into Vermont. “We don’t need the money.”

“We don’t need the money now,” he said. “Three months from now we’ll need it, though.”

“We don’t need his money, she snapped. “Anyway, by then you’ll have found a new job.”

“Maybe. But suppose I don’t? Or suppose it pays half what I was making before?”

“So we go begging for a handout.”

Brian glanced at her. Her good looks not withstanding Diana had one of those impassive faces: hard to read. But he could tell that she was irritated; there glimmered in her eyes that subtle expression of dislike that he’d come to know well over the last couple of years.

“I could always get a job,” she added.

Brian felt like telling her that he wished she would. But he said nothing, just stared through the windshield at the road ahead. Maybe with the way things were going Diana would leave him. Brian waited for the gut punch that ought to have followed that thought. It never came.

She took up the argument again as they left Interstate 91 for the state route that would take them to Uncle Kurt’s house.

“I don’t like him,” Diana said. She kept her head turned, staring out at the passing scenery—characteristically dismal at the tag end of winter. The sun was out, struggling through patchy clouds, slowly dissolving the mounded dirty snow that lined the shoulders of the road.

“You only met him once,” Brian said. “At the wedding.”

“And I didn’t like him.”

“I get that.”

“Why did he even come to our wedding?”

“Don’t ask me.”

But he thought about it as the miles passed. Uncle Kurt had slipped into the church just before the ceremony, taking a seat in the back. He smiled and nodded as the happy couple came down the aisle. Brian had checked his step for a moment, causing Diana to glace at him questioningly. Then at the reception Uncle Kurt put in a brief appearance. He kissed Diana’s cheek and pressed an envelope into Brian’s hand. The three of them chatted for a few minutes, Diana’s initial cordiality fading as she realized who he was. The envelope contained twenty-five one-hundred-dollar bills.

Finally they reached the left turn that led up to Uncle Kurt’s house: a narrow dirt road signposted B12 snaking through wooded terrain. Now the threatening clouds closed in, shutting out the sun. A light rain, little more than a mist, began to fall.

Then they discovered that last night’s storm had blown down a tree, blocking the road.

“Guess we’ll have to walk the rest of the way,” Brian said.

Diana gave him a look.

“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Brian said as he opened the door and stepped onto the road.

“Mud,” she said. “Drizzle. And it’s cold. Why did we have to make this trip? Couldn’t you have at least begged for his money over the phone?”

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

“And now you expect me to climb over this tree,” she snapped, “and hike up this muddy road to the house.”

“It’s not far.” Brian jumped onto the tree trunk, then down to the road. “Maybe a quarter of a mile. And it’s not that muddy, Diana.”

“All right, all right!”

“We’re here so let’s just get it over with,” he said, holding out his hand. “Okay? Now come on.”

Brain held Diana’s elbow as she clambered over the tree trunk.

“Shit!”

“What’s the matter now?”

“I ripped my sleeve on that branch. This is a brand-new jacket, you know!”

“I’ll buy you another jacket, Diana. I’ll buy you two.”

She jerked her arm out of his grip and pulled the hood of the jacket over her blonde hair.

“Look,” he said. “The sooner we get up there, the sooner this will be over and done with.”

“I hate that we’re doing this,” she said as they trudged up the muddy road. “I hate that we drove all the way up from Union to submit to a personal interview with that old jailbird. It’s degrading, Brian.”

“We need the money,” he reminded her. “Now come on.”

“Oh, my God,” she said as they rounded the final bend. “What an ugly house,”

Uncle Kurt’s house stood to their right, on a slight rise. It was built of dingy red brick. The two-story central section was flanked by a one-car garage on the right and a single-story addition on the left. But the house looked curiously squat, slope-shouldered under the low, fast-racing clouds. Twenty feet of front lawn ran down to the road and a paved driveway led up to the garage. The surrounding woods pressed close upon the back and sides of this ugly house that Uncle Kurt had bought for himself after serving his three-year prison sentence.

“Why anybody with as much money as he has would choose to live up this miserable dirt road, surrounded by these woods, is beyond me. It’s depressing.” Diana shivered in her jacket. “Well? Are going in or not?”

“Sure. Come on.”

They walked up the driveway and turned left to the front door. Brian rang the bell.

“Is he even here?” she said. “You did call ahead, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

Brian rang the bell again and after a moment the door opened.

“Hello, Uncle Kurt, he said to the old man in the doorway. “You remember Diana, don’t you?”

Kurt wasn’t really his uncle. But the two of them, Kurt and Brian’s father, had been like brothers in the old days. So when he was a boy he’d called the man Uncle Kurt.

“Ah, yes,” the old man nodded. “The beauteous Diana. Welcome.”

She didn’t like Uncle Kurt but Diana did like compliments and despite her distemper she smiled at this one.

“This girl’s too good for you,” Uncle Kurt said as he stood aside to let them in. “Too good entirely.”

“So I’m told. By the way, there’s a tree down across your road.”

“Is there?” Uncle Kurt replied without much interest. “Hmph.”

He ushered them into an untidy front room, gestured toward the sofa and settled himself into a battered old leather armchair.

Brian looked around. There was a writing desk under the window. Off in the corner there was a table—it looked like a kitchen table—with an office chair pushed under it. The table was littered with loose-leaf binders, cigar boxes, miscellaneous clutter that he couldn’t identify.

“So,” Uncle Kurt said, clearing his throat. “So. How have you been?”

“Oh, fine.”

“Still working for…what was it?” Uncle Kurt frowned. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”

“The advertising agency in Fitchburg,” Brain said. “And no.”

“Greener pastures?” Uncle Kurt raised his eyebrows. “Good for you. Your father…well…the idea of his son working in advertising…”

“They fired him,” Diana snapped.

“Laid me off,” Brian amended. “Me and half a dozen others. The agency lost a big account. It happens.”

“Well,” Uncle Kurt said, drawling it out, “such are the perils of a market economy, eh?”

“It’s actually not funny,” Diana said. Down in the basement the furnace kicked in with a low growl. “But I don’t suppose you have that worry. Making ends meet.”

“No, I’m fortunate in that regard at least.”

They sat in silence for a long moment.

“Could we get to the point?” Diana said finally, looking at Brian.

“The point being…?” Uncle Kurt inquired. He looked at Brian, not Diana.

So Brian launched into his appeal. He spoke briefly and with businesslike precision, as if pitching a concept to a client.

“Twenty thousand?” Uncle Kurt repeated. “A tidy sum, as my dear old dad used to say.”

“If you can manage it.”

“Oh, I can manage it just fine,” said Uncle Kurt.

He smiled and Brian flashed on a memory of the long-ago, when Uncle Kurt had had a different last name. They—Uncle Kurt, his parents, one or two others—had been sitting at the kitchen table and the two men were talking elliptically of the Collective. Who could be trusted, who could not. Whose commitment was sincere, who was a hanger-on. He remembered Uncle Kurt saying a similar thing: Don’t worry about it. I can manage her just fine. How old had he been? Five? Six? A year later he’d been handed over to an aunt and uncle and after that he never saw his parents again.

Uncle Kurt had aged since then—brown hair gone dirty gray, face lined, voice coarsened by cigarettes and booze—but his blue eyes and his edgy smile were just the same. Brian smiled himself, remembering how Uncle Kurt had drummed his fingers on the tabletop, assessing the commitment and loyalty of this and that member of the Collective.

“You know,” said Brian, “I think I recognize that table over there.”

“Oh?” Uncle Kurt nodded. “That’s a good memory you’ve got on you. It’s the kitchen table from the farmhouse. Christ, you were—what?—six at the time?”

“Something like that.” Brian gestured toward the table. “And you kept it all these years?”

“Sold the place, oh, eight or ten years ago.” Uncle Kurt shrugged. “I salvaged a few things. It makes a good worktable.”

“Yes,” Brian said, nodding. “So I see.”

“Do you mind?” Uncle Kurt asked, drawing a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. Not waiting for permission, he shook one out and lit up. Diana wrinkled her nose.

“So you need money,” he said, returning to the point “All right. But—”

“There’s a but?” Diana said. Brian could see that she was becoming angry on his behalf. He knew, though, that anger wouldn’t work with Uncle Kurt. He glanced at her, shook his head.

“Your father would have understood this, Brian—he would have understood that I have to be careful. He himself was in some things a careful man.” Uncle Kurt drew on his cigarette. “Not in all things but in some things. You’ll understand, I hope, that after all these years I’d rather not draw attention to myself. So if I give you the money, I don’t want you telling anyone where it came from.”

“Why would I?” Brian said. “And would anybody really care? After all this time?”

“No,” Uncle Kurt said. “No, probably not. People around here do know who I am. Well, some do. A few aging hippies and so forth. But you’re right, no one really cares about the broke-dick Sixties radical who lives up the dirt road. Indulge me, however. Old habits die hard.”

“But if no one cares—” Diana began.

“I was present at the revolution, you see,” Uncle Kurt broke in. “Then two years underground, which is no way to live—believe me. Well, having had a bellyful of that I turned myself in, cut a deal, served my time. You know the story. So now I go by a different last name and I live in this God-forsaken corner of bastard Vermont. I’ve come to appreciate the peace and quiet.”

“But my father,” Brian said. “He didn’t sell out.”

“Oh, is that what I did?” Uncle Kurt extinguished his cigarette. “Is that what he told you I did? Or was it your mother? No doubt she carried the torch to the bitter end! Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!”

“I never spoke to my mother. Dad said it would be too hard on her. But he kept in contact with me.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not often.” Brian said. “Maybe once or twice a year. They were still hunting for him. I was a freshman in college the first time he contacted me.”

“Yes, they were still hunting for him.” Uncle Kurt paused. “I would hear occasionally from my old friends in the FBI. Oh, they wanted your father! Because of the girl, of course—she was the daughter of a Deputy Secretary of Defense, you know. And because of those two cops. Toward the end, the lead agent on your father’s case was a young woman named Getz. Special Agent Getz. Very committed. Very intense. Special Agent Getz thought that he might possibly get in touch with me. I was to let her know immediately if that ever happened—which it never did, I’m glad to say.”

“Dad told me that didn’t hold it against you,” Brian said. “Even though you—”

“Even though I sold them out.”

“He always said that he understood.”

“He understood, did he? Jesus Christ.” Uncle Kurt rubbed his hand over his face. “That bastard. If the FBI had been able to connect me to the kidnapping I’d be tucked away in some supermax prison cell to this very day.”

“But they couldn’t connect you, could they?”

“No, they couldn’t. Because I decided that I wanted no part of it.” Uncle Kurt turned his head to peer through the picture window that overlooked the front lawn. “It got to a point—long before the kidnapping—where I told your father no. No. No fucking way—to quote myself precisely.”

“The ROTC bombing.”

“That’s when I bailed.” Uncle Kurt shook his head. “No one got killed. Not that time.”

“What has this got to do with the money?” Diana snapped.

“He told me you were afraid,” Brian said to Uncle Kurt.

“Did he?” The old man laughed. “Well, if your father wasn’t afraid, then maybe he wasn’t as smart as I always thought he was. But maybe fear was for the turncoats, not the true believers. How I used to envy him his certitude.”

“And you gave him up,” Brian said. “You gave all of them up. To the government.”

“By then it was over and done with,” Uncle Kurt said. Suddenly he sounded tired. “The handover of the ransom botched, the girl and two cops dead, the bunch of them underground, on the run. They had me by the balls, those FBI bastards, so in exchange for a short sentence someplace not too uncomfortable I told them what I knew. Which was just enough, thank God, to salvage my skinny ass.”

“You testified against them,” Brian said as Diana fidgeted beside him. “The ones that the FBI arrested.”

“That was the deal. And I’ll tell you, Brian, I’d have testified against your parents too. But of course they slipped the net.”

“None of this…?

“Bothered my conscience?” Uncle Kurt stood up and crossed the room to a sideboard on which stood bottles of whiskey, gin, vodka. He hesitated for a moment, then poured vodka into a glass. Turning, he held up the bottle to Brian and Diana.

“Join me?”

“No,” they said together.

Uncle Kurt shrugged and knocked back the shot. He poured another one and returned to his chair.

“Jerry died in prison,” he said. But Andrea and Harold had their sentences commuted years ago and now they’re on the faculty of—I forget where.”

“The University of Colorado Boulder,” Brian said.

“And they actually got married.”

“Do you ever hear from them?”

“Once,” Uncle Kurt said. “Harold called, oh, eight or nine years ago. To denounce me as a traitor. I suppose he had to get that off his chest. And I told him what I’m telling you now. It didn’t bother my conscience. Your father and the rest of them? They were batshit crazy. Well, maybe not Grace. Not your mother. But do you know what she was? A groupie, besotted with the glamorous revolutionary. Who dragged her down with him. Destroyed her,” he went on in a grating voice. “And I have no doubt that she died with an admiring smile on her lips…”

He knocked back the vodka. No one said anything. The furnace coughed and shut off.

“I feel like a shit for putting it that way,” Uncle Kurt added.

“It’s all right.”

“I can’t say I was surprised, though.” Uncle Kurt contemplated the empty glass in his hand. “Special Agent Getz came by to give me the news personally. She told me that they’d killed themselves to avoid arrest.”

“Was that true?” Brian said.

“She thought so. There was a lead that turned out to have been pointing in the right direction. But no, I don’t think it happened that way.” Uncle Kurt sighed. “No, what I think is that your father ended it because he happened to wake up that morning with the realization that it’d been all for nothing—the demonstrations, the chants, the manifestos, the fiery articles in the student newspaper, the Viet Cong flags, the bank robberies, the bombings, the lost lives—the whole bullshit guerrilla circus.”

He set the glass down with a bang. “The revolution wasn’t happening and it never would. Now your father always had a high opinion of his own potential but there he was, sixty-seven years old, hiding out under an assumed name in a shitty little town in southern Indiana, living in a shitty little apartment, working at a shitty little job. Maybe he’d been easing up to it for a long time. Maybe that morning it all came to a head and he decided to check out. And I’ll tell you something else. I’d be willing to bet serious money that right at the end, with the gun in his hand, he spared not one second’s thought for that dead girl or those two dead cops.”

“Or for my mother.”

“No. He knew that where he went, she’d follow. You wouldn’t really remember what they were like together. She…”

But then Uncle Kurt’s eyes seemed to mist over and he sat back with a sigh.

“He called me,” Brian said. “Two weeks before.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe I will have that drink,” Brian said. There was a pause while Uncle Kurt poured out three shots and distributed them. Diana took hers with a small nod of thanks.

“So he called you. That doesn’t surprise me.” Uncle Kurt lit another cigarette. “He’d do that—a thing like that.”

“It was the first time I’d heard from him in…a long time.”

“You favor her, you know,” Uncle Kurt said. “Your mother. Same green eyes.”

“He talked about you,” Brian said, holding the glass with its shot of vodka in both hands. “Not about—”

“My great betrayal.”

“Not about that, no. He just said that if I ever needed help I should go to you.”

“For money? Is that what he told you?”

“Not in so many words,” Brian nodded. “He just said that you owed him. And through him, me.”

“And here you are to collect,” Uncle Kurt said. He laughed. “So. The circle closes.”

“You never told me that,” Diana said. They both looked at her. “That your father called you so soon before…”

“Your father was always a bastard,” Uncle Kurt said. “And back then I actually admired him for it. Everybody looked to him—he was the live wire, the guy who got things done. So of course he rose to become the leader of our revolutionary band. Oh, there wasn’t supposed to be a leader. Collective decision making—that’s what we called those sessions around the kitchen table. But nobody crossed him, ever. Our very own little Lenin, that was him.”

Brian lifted the glass and looked at it. Then he drank, wincing slightly as the vodka burned its way down.

“It’s a funny thing, though,” Uncle Kurt went on. “It wasn’t his idea—the kidnapping. I was long gone and underground by then but I heard the story from someone who knew someone who knew Andrea. Remember Billy? The kid from Kansas with the blonde hair? He’s the one who dreamed it up. Just another revolutionary masturbation fantasy. For a week or so they all sat around talking about it. Playing with it, really. Until your father—”

He broke off and shrugged.

“I know who Billy was,” Brian said. “And I remember him, too.”

“Sure, we all remember Billy.” Uncle Kurt shook his head. “You know, people still visit his grave on the anniversary. They leave flowers. As if he was a hero of the revolution. But the truth is, he was the asshole who screwed everything up. Killed the girl when she freaked out and tried to fight him off. She slapped him, clawed his face, so he shot her. Which brought the cops. Both of whom my old comrades gunned down on the sidewalk outside the townhouse. One of those cops got Billy, though. And your father…your father left him there to bleed out and die in the gutter. Ah, Jesus…”

The three of them sat quietly for some time as the furnace kicked back on and a watery beam of sunlight found its way through the window.

“You know,” said Uncle Kurt eventually, “It’s good you came because I didn’t know it, but I actually had to talk about all that.”

“I thought it didn’t bother your conscience,” Brian said.

“Well, maybe it does, though not in the way you mean.” The old man turned his head to look out the window. “I have my regrets, I suppose.”

Another silence descended. Brian studied the bar of sunlight that had fallen across the carpet. The story of his father’s life and death, repeated at the tag end of winter in the front room of this ugly house, seemed dated and tawdry in the retelling. It faded in his mind as the clouds closed in once more and the sunlight failed. He glanced at Diana. She caught his eye and the beginnings of a smile touched her lips.

“All right then,” said Uncle Kurt. He got up and crossed the room to the desk. “We’ll close that circle. You can have the money, Brian. Let’s call it twenty-five thousand. I’ll write you a check.”

“That’s generous of you,” said Diana in a tone of voice that made him check his step, look at her and raise an eyebrow.

“You don’t have to do this,” she added.

“Don’t I? Maybe not.” He sat down at the desk. “But since you came all this way…”

Brian had gotten up from the sofa and was standing at the old kitchen table. The binders he’d noticed earlier were thickly bound in green imitation leather, gold-embossed with the words PRESTIGE COLLECTION OF U.S. POSTAGE STAMPS. There were also a couple of old cigar boxes, some loose album pages, a litter of glassine envelopes, tweezers, a magnifying glass.

“My dad collected stamps,” Uncle Kurt said as he rummaged in the desk for his checkbook. “Found the old collection when I was cleaning out the farmhouse. I’ve been reorganizing it and bringing it up to date. It passes the time. Especially in the winter.”

Brian opened one of the binders. Turning the pages with care he found 1970. In that year of the Collective’s great debacle the Postal Service had issued stamps commemorating Maine statehood, the United Nations, the landing of the Pilgrims, other things.

“I did feel like a rat, you know. I mean at first, when I cut my deal with the government.” Uncle Kurt was making out the check. “But I had time to think about it. In prison. And later. That young girl. Those two cops.”

He tore the check out of the book, got to his feet and handed it to Diana. She took it with a nod of thanks.

“Some things became clear,” Uncle Kurt went on. “Such as the fact that we did it to ourselves—me with my choices, the others with theirs. I chose to save my sorry ass at their expense. I’m not particularly proud of that but it doesn’t keep me up nights. The rest of it, though, I could never figure out. What were we doing, sitting around that kitchen table? What was it all for?” He laughed without humor. “It was for shit, that’s what.”

He shook his head and went to pour himself another shot of vodka.

“I’ll join you,” Brian said. “And there’s something I want to tell you. Then we’d better be on our way.”

“What’s that?” said Uncle Kurt, handing him a glass.

“Just that you did the right thing.”

Brian saluted with his glass and knocked back the shot. He knew he’d never see the old man again.

They were back on the Mass Pike, heading east toward Union, before Diana spoke. She’d been checking her messages but now she put the phone away and sighed.

“There were things you never told me,” Diana said.

“You knew the story,” Brian answered, glancing at her.

“But I always thought you…”

“Loved my father? Oh, I hated the bastard.” He sighed. “Whenever he called the last thing he’d say was that he loved me. I didn’t believe him, though, and I never said it back.”

“You should have told me.”

“I suppose I was ashamed.” He glanced at her. “And I used to think—but I’m nothing like him.”

“No. No, you’re not.”

“I don’t like the look of those clouds,” Brian said. “They look like snow.”

“We’ll be fine,” Diana said. “We’re halfway home.”