They had been driving for more than an hour on a succession of small rural roads, creeping along at just under the speed limit although it was near five o’clock in the morning. A waxing moon hung fuzzy and huge just above the horizon. The damp of the summer night strangely translated the moon’s weak gold light through the air, so that though it was dark you could see a great deal—shadowy forms of dense woods, lone trees, smooth dark hills reaching to the horizon. She had been staring out the window a long time. “Rob,” she said. “When Pauline joined the cadre—are you sure it was truly her choice?”
“I had doubts too until I met them.” Frazer paused. When he spoke again his voice was so certain it almost sounded grim. “She’s riding with them, for sure. You’ll see what I mean.”
The stars were just starting to fade when they found it, a faint dirt track climbing a long grassy slope from the road. The car shuddered on the uneven ground. They were almost at the top before they saw the house, small and dark, with the dark woods behind it. From here you’d have warning long in advance of anybody heading toward you from the road. As if to prove this she saw Carol standing outside, waiting for them. Carol was wearing shorts and a large sweater and was hugging herself against the dawn cold. Frazer touched Jenny suddenly, seized her hand—he hadn’t even tried to touch her when she’d shown up at his motel room door, when she’d sat in the doorway with him for hours, smoking, arguing, settling what she would do, what she wouldn’t. His hands had stayed carefully far. Now he seized her hand just as their long ride alone was over; she no sooner felt it than he let go again and they’d come to a stop. Frazer rolled down his window and Carol ran over and said, “Pull around back where the other car is,” and turned to lead them to the rear of the house.
When they had parked he sat a beat without moving, and she thought he was going to speak. Then he simply got out of the car, and so she got out, too.
“Hi, Jen,” Carol said. “We were worried about you.” Belatedly they jerked forward and hugged. In the brief moment of the embrace she looked up and saw Frazer watching. He looked away quickly.
Carol detached herself and said to Frazer, “I need to get back to the city for work. I’ve been waiting all night for you guys. What the hell took so long?”
“Where are they?”
“Sleeping. Finally. After marching all over the house like crazies, doing ‘security checks’ and complaining about every goddamn—”
“Carol,” Frazer said.
“I’ll go in,” Jenny said, quickly pulling her things from the car.
The back door was a rickety screen in an old wooden frame; it whined as she eased it open. She heard a sound like small rubber balls tumbling: mice. Inside she set her things down and waited for her eyes to adjust. She was in a small kitchen: all the usual things plus a table and chairs, and several full-looking grocery bags on the table. She trailed her fingers on the wall, turned through a doorway to a small vestibule at the foot of a short flight of stairs. Through a second doorway was a room growing gray with the dawn. A few curtained windows, another door at the far side that was closed, the dark shape of a couch. She didn’t know where the fugitives were, she realized. Whether they were upstairs, or downstairs, or behind the closed door. She heard the screen door squeak open and then Frazer was in the room with her. “Jen,” he whispered. She heard an engine cough, start. “Carol’s tapped out and she wants to get back to the city. So I’m running her back, because we’re leaving the other car here for you. You’ll need money. Shit. This is—shit. I have forty. Okay? Next time I come I’ll give you enough for a month. But write that down, so I don’t forget. Jenny? Write down what I gave you and keep track so I know what I’ve spent. Get a notebook or something.”
“Okay,” she said. Her heart was banging, the way it had banged at the station in Rhinecliff when she had walked out and seen him and not known where she was, who she was, anything. The car, the car that she and Frazer had arrived in, was pulling around to the front of the house with Carol at the wheel. She followed Frazer to the door. Carol did not look over at them.
“I’ll be back soon,” Frazer said. “I’ve been away from home for weeks dealing with this, so I have a whole lot to catch up on. But you can handle it until I get back. Keep cool,” he added, as he strode away quickly and climbed into the passenger seat. Frazer and Carol drove off without waving good-bye.
BY EIGHT in the morning the heat was rising, along with the noises of insects. Deafening chirrs, rattles, buzzes; so many variations of drone from invisible sources, each a note she parsed out with her ear but the whole somehow unified also, in a rhythm like waves. She sat at the kitchen table, paralyzed, waiting for some sign or noise from somewhere. Finally she went outside and tried to find a place of repose there, in the overgrown grass, but the soft patches it promised from a few feet away were all equally prickly and crawling with bugs when she got to them. Even from a few yards off the house shrank drastically. It seemed to be capsizing in its ocean of grass. She stood looking up the hill to where the dark woods began and climbed up to the ridge, and down to where she knew the road lay, out of sight. She crossed her arms tightly over her breasts; she felt cold although it was hot. Nothing about the house and the long golden hillside it sat on didn’t feel abandoned, as if it was all an old luckless homestead that the owners had fled. Up an S-shaped pair of ruts from the house was a barn and an almost dry pond. She waded slowly through the grass to the barn and pulled its heavy doors open, belatedly starting with fright, as if the three fugitives were inside. But it was only a flock of pigeons exploding above her, in the dim space of crisscrossing rafters; she watched them arc through the pale beams of light falling in through the roof. The barn was full of dark shapes, smelled of moldering hay. She backed out and latched the doors shut again.
The house was still eerily silent when she returned to it; nothing had changed except that there was more light, and more heat. She eased one of the kitchen windows open and right away the screen door began to slap in its frame from the breeze; she rushed to latch it, but she still didn’t hear a roused cough or a footfall. In the front room motes of dust turned in the light coming in through the drapes. She carefully opened a window here, too. The door off the front room that had been closed before was still closed. A second door that stood ajar revealed the bathroom, an old toilet with a pull-chain, an old tub with a green copper streak where the faucet was leaking. Leaving the bathroom and going to the foot of the short flight of stairs she could see a patch of sunlight at the top: a door upstairs was open. She climbed up, creaking no matter how slowly she went, and at the top found the open door, the only door there was, leading into a little low-pitched attic room with a single low window. That was all; now she had seen every room in the house but the closed room downstairs. There wasn’t even a cellar. The attic room was bare except for a single narrow bed against one wall, a frail-looking table, a lamp and a frail-looking chair. Along the opposite wall was a thick rectangle of dust on the floor. It was about the same size as the bed, as if it had been moved in one piece from beneath it, or rather, she realized, as if another bed had been moved from above it. She got down on her knees beside the bed and flipped up the threadbare coverlet it was made up with, to look underneath. There was a thick pad of dust down there, too. So they really were here. They had taken a bed from upstairs, and moved it downstairs, behind the closed door. Somehow this small confirmation that she wasn’t alone was less reassuring than startling, like the footprint on the sand in Robinson Crusoe.
The exposed stretch of dust, the shadow of the bed they’d removed, stirred and began to disperse in gray clumps when she opened the single window to let in the breeze. The sun was high now, and the cramped room was hot. She’d begun pouring huge beads of sweat. She was tired, she realized. She hadn’t slept in a day, not since she’d risen early to go to Poughkeepsie and come back to find Frazer at the train station, waiting for her.
She climbed onto the bed, which stank faintly of mildew. For a moment her loneliness swept her and she thought she would never descend into sleep. But she was so tired that the next time she opened her eyes it was dusk. Now the bare room was softened and blue, with cool air pulsing in through the window. Outside she could see the dark form of the barn, and closer, the texture of a huge maple fading with the last of the light. Even the insect symphony had grown smaller and simpler; single crickets creaking tentative up-notes, and something else, a soft whirr. The best time was dusk, she realized. The sharp baring light bled away but the night hadn’t come. That was the fugitive’s hour, when the darkening air felt like shelter, yet you still had your eyes.
Downstairs the front room was as shadowy as it had been when she’d first seen it that morning; the one door was still shut. She tiptoed into the bathroom and peed without turning the light on. She put her hand on the chain, then thought again and simply put down the lid. In the doorway from the front room to the kitchen were her duffel and accordion file; she’d forgotten about them. Frazer seemed to have brought her here, left her here, eons ago. Passing through the kitchen and pulling open the screen door she caught her breath and stood still. Someone was sitting on the step, a hunched form in a blanket facing away from her in the direction of the hill climbing up to the barn, and beyond, to the woods; and then the dark ridge giving way to the sky, strangely pale from the afterglow. After a long moment the form didn’t turn to her so much as it twitched aside slightly, shifted in the most minimal, barely animate way while still giving her room to step out.
It was the man—Juan—as she’d sensed it would be, from the wideness of the hunched, shrouded back. But nothing else about him was familiar. The photos she’d seen in the papers had shown a grinning boy with curly hair and a blunt nose and round cheeks, a midwestern farm kid, robust; because the pictures only ever showed his head and shoulders she’d had to extrapolate the rest of the body, and she’d imagined him tallish and tapered. But he was small and compact, like a barrel with legs. And though the face was the part she had seen, in the flesh it was equally startling and strange. Beneath a globe of wild hair and a beard and a small pair of wire-rimmed glasses his face was dull, its lines muddied. His eyes were obscured in dark hollows but she could feel him staring at her from what seemed to be deep, inert shock, as if she were an apparition, a supernatural event thrust upon him that jammed all his modes of response. A crumpled pack of cigarettes lay in the grass by his feet. He seemed to have carried them outside and then let them fall from his fingers, forgetting about them. “Hi,” she said, because it was the only syllable that seemed appropriate for utterance by itself, and she couldn’t imagine uttering more than one syllable now that the air felt so fragile and tense, with this motionless man staring at her. It was strange to hear her voice, smaller amid the noises of insects and leaves than she’d thought it would be.
“You’re not Carol,” he managed, and his voice did no better than hers, rattling out through what sounded like a quagmire of phlegm and fatigue and smoked cigarettes.
“I’m Jenny. Carol and Frazer’s friend.”
Juan nodded without interest; he’d been told about her. “Where is he?” he asked after a minute.
“They’ve both gone back to the city already.”
“I don’t remember him coming.”
“It was early this morning. He’ll be back soon,” she added, although nothing about Juan’s tone suggested he cared if he ever saw Frazer again. “And I’m here, to take care of the day-to-day things. To help you, with whatever you need.”
But Juan—if it really was Juan, if it really was one of the former notorious twelve when you counted their captive; the impetuous brandisher of shotguns; the now-leader of the two that remained of his three-quarters-slaughtered army—had tipped his forehead down onto his fist, as if the weight of his head was too much. The darkness deepened around them, and so many minutes went by she thought he might be asleep. Guiltily, she felt her appetite stirring. She hadn’t eaten since a quick roadside burger she and Frazer had gotten on the way out of Rhinecliff the previous night, but being hungry right now seemed perverse. She’d finally located the source of the dread she’d been feeling since dawn. It was death. It didn’t hang about Juan like a shroud, or sit at the back of his eyes like a nightmare he’d had. It was nowhere that she could pinpoint, since she didn’t know what to look for, but she still had the sense it had dusted his skin with its ash. In the end his nine comrades had been burned, so the previous day’s papers had said, so completely each charred bone had to be picked from the ash, one by one. They’d been found wearing army gas masks that had melted and fused to their skulls. She felt her stomach flip. Juan’s form still hadn’t moved. She could barely tell him apart from the house now. The stars had grown bright in the sky.
“I’ll make something for us to eat,” she said, although now her appetite truly was gone. She took a step toward him, back toward the door, and again he twitched aside. So he was still awake.
She squeezed back through the door. When she found the kitchen light and turned it on her reflection in the window over the sink spooked her. For an instant she thought someone else was outside, peering in. “Juan?” cried a voice. And then edging into the doorway from the front room with a hand over her eyes was Pauline, or the person who must be Pauline. Jenny felt as if she were watching the sort of old movie in which the lead character is surprisingly revealed to have a dark twin; that the twin is played by the same actor only deepens the strange sense of oppositeness. The gold-haired debutante of the newspaper and magazine photos seemed not even coincidentally linked to this girl. Pauline’s hair was ragged and dyed a ghastly dark red, between fresh blood and beets. Jenny had imagined her tall as well but she was tiny, not just short but reduced drastically to her bones. Her skin was so pale it seemed bluish, except for purple stains under her eyes, which were vast in her face. Her filthy T-shirt and blue jeans hung around her like sackcloth. She stared at Jenny with shock, as Juan had. “Why’s the light on?” she said.
Outside Juan had risen and opened the door. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, coming in. Pauline turned to Juan and seemed to forget Jenny was there.
“I woke up and you were gone,” Pauline said.
Juan, upright but slumped, as if he’d been hung from a hook, gazed back at Pauline, and even through his deathly fatigue Jenny thought she saw a movement of habitual surprise, as if he still couldn’t believe that he saw Pauline standing in front of him. “Where’s Y?” he asked.
“Sleeping.”
“You should sleep too.”
“I can’t.”
After a moment Juan brushed past Jenny, as if he had also forgotten her, and with an effort rooted into the grocery bags on the table. She went to help him, to see what there was, but it was only a bag of potato chips and a box of cornflakes, a soup can, a banana—castoffs from Carol’s pantry. All the rest of the bags contained nothing but huge jugs of wine. One was already open and practically empty. Juan pawed into a cupboard and came up with a tall, dusty glass which he filled from the jug to its rim. He handed the glass to Pauline and poured one for himself. Pauline stared into it for a minute, took a small sip, and then began to drink it off steadily, as if the glass contained water.
“Our Code forbids drugs,” Juan began, leaning heavily on the counter as he recorked the jug, and it was a beat before Jenny realized he was talking to her. “But our leader drank wine, when his worries were clouding his thoughts. Wine’s a natural thing, wine and grass . . .” Juan seemed to decide that the lesson was not worth the trouble. A door opened at the back of the house and suddenly the third of them, Yvonne, was approaching the doorway, her matted blond curls standing out from her head. She was wearing a thin cotton halter that clung to her breasts, and thin panties, and nothing else. Jenny could see her large nipples, the dark hair curling out at the tops of her thighs. She was vital and tall, with grainy peach skin and an elfin nose covered with freckles. Whatever storm they had endured, she seemed to have stood it the best, or perhaps she’d once been even taller and stronger, an Amazon. She stared at Jenny impassively.
“The comrade Frazer told us about,” Juan said to Yvonne. “Jenny.”
Yvonne nodded.
“You want some wine, baby?” Juan said after a minute.
Yvonne nodded again.
Juan had his own wine in one hand. With the other he hooked a finger through the loop on the jug and a finger into a third dusty glass in the cupboard. Then without another word or glance in her direction they melted away again, out of the kitchen. She heard them bumping through the darkened front room, through their bedroom doorway. The door slowly scraped shut.
DRIVING WEST from the farmhouse the road threaded between forested hills without a lot or a dirt track cut into them, and through gold agricultural valleys that never held more than one fatigued pile of wooden farm buildings, or one sprinkling of lying-down cows. Every few miles there was a sign for a town, but Jenny could not even see where these towns were. Only once did she descend into the heart of a settlement, something called Ferndale that consisted of a post office, Agway, and church, and she didn’t dare stop; she sank deep in her seat and slid past, a pair of eyes and a cap of black hair above the wheel of a rusting red Bug. She had always thought of Rhinebeck and Rhinecliff, with their fences and farms and their view of the Hudson with its barges and tugs, as the country, but they were really outposts of New York, strung along New York’s river. This felt like a lost land, connected to nothing.
She was twenty minutes past Ferndale and forty minutes away from the farm when she finally came on a junction of the small local road with a four-lane state highway. There were newspaper boxes at the curb here instead of inside a quaint general store. She bought the Times and something called the Monticello Examiner, and set out to explore what must be Monticello. It was a largish small town, down-at-heels, with a blacker and shabbier side, and three grocery stores. She cased all three, although she knew as soon as she found it she’d go back to the black one, where there wasn’t a single new car in the lot. When she did she parked in the confusion of rusting cars and empty shopping carts and did the shopping as fast as she could, arriving at the register with a tonnage of cans—canned soup, chili, spaghetti, beans, corn, tuna fish, and even something that claimed to be bread in a can. “You digging in,” the cashier commented. She yelled across the store suddenly and Jenny’s palms began to tingle with prickly heat, but it was only a summons to a long, lanky boy with a comb in his hair to load the groceries into boxes and get them out to her car. The boy’s hair was a fluffy brown corona; after he’d put the groceries into the boxes and the boxes in a cart he paused to pull the comb free and give his hair a bunch of expert little yanks, as if he thought it was sagging.
“You from Vietnam?” he asked Jenny as they crossed the parking lot.
“No!” she said, startled. She realized she’d forgotten to come up with a story. She couldn’t be “Iris Wong, Chinese, from San Francisco” anymore. She stared at the boy with alarm.
“Sorry!” he said. “Not from Nam. Okay, not-from-Nam, where you from? I’m just asking a question.”
“New York,” she said finally.
“City?”
She nodded.
“Aw,” said the boy in admiration. “Some real bad luck must have landed you in Monticello.” They had reached the Bug by now and she began to struggle with the handle that opened the hood. “My brother went to Vietnam,” the boy went on, taking out his comb again while he waited. She finally got the hood open, and the boy began to heft in the boxes of cans. There were five boxes and only two of them fit. He opened the car’s door to put the other three on the backseat.
“What happened to him?” She started scooping out her change bag for a tip as the boy shoved the last box into place, and eased his upper body carefully free of the car, without marring his hairdo.
“They got him,” the boy said. He grinned, as if embarrassed. “He was fast but they was faster.” He held out his hand for the tip with a goofy flourish. “I am not supposed to take gratuities, but those boxes were heavy. Good luck,” he added, and his gaze seemed suddenly penetrating when he trained it on her. Her heart jumped.
“Thanks,” she said.
Back on the state highway she tried a new road and after fifteen minutes was in a town much larger than Ferndale but smaller than Monticello, called Liberty. She found the post office quickly, a surprisingly grand marble building. There were a few other cars in the small lot, a few other people on the sidewalk, mailing letters in the outside mailboxes and going on with their days. No one looked particularly at her. Inside the post office was cool and cavernous; it seemed to have been built for a town that expected to be larger and more consequential. Only one window was open. The woman behind it did not say anything as she approached, merely cast a cold, impassive look in her direction, and remained motionless.
“I need a post office box,” she said, her heart racing in a riot of fear and also excitement, just as it had the first time she had done this, in Red Hook.
She filled the form out swiftly. Now the whole story had come to her. Alice Chan, from New York. Landscape painter. “I travel,” she said casually, as she wrote, “but I pass by here often.”
“You can’t be leaving your mail in the box for weeks on end, and letting the box get clogged up. We don’t allow that. You can’t just be letting junk mail pile up in your box. You’ve got to empty it regularly or we’ll empty it for you. Right into the trash.”
When she had her key she moved around a corner and out of the woman’s view, to the long wall of tiny bronze doors. The new box had a bronze eagle on it. She didn’t much care for the symbol, but it was beautifully done in relief. Old, like the rest of the building. She ran a finger over it, then tested the key to make sure that it worked. The box was like a miniature of the lobby she stood in: cool, dim and empty. She peered into it, but only saw a blank wall opposite, no sorting area, no canvas bins piled with letters. She closed the box, pocketed the key.
After the post office she found a good phone booth in the parking lot of a boarded-up diner and called Frazer at home. It was early enough in the morning that she knew he would be there. Carol answered, her voice hoarse from a late night; in the background Jenny could hear the intimate squeak of the bed-springs, the rustling of sheets. “Hi,” she said.
“Hang on,” Carol said sharply.
There was a flurry of muffling sounds and tense murmurs; then Frazer came on. “I’m just on my way to the store,” he said. “To pick up some milk.”
She hung up and checked her watch; then she hugged herself, waiting. Just past ten A.M. Fifteen minutes seemed unendurably long. She wondered if she should go sit in the car, or pull the car around the back of the building where it couldn’t be seen from the road. It looked incongruous, parked alone in the diner’s empty lot. Almost no one was driving by on the road, but as one car passed, and then, long ticks later, another, she could swear that they slowed down a little. She had her back to the road, a hip canted in the attitude of casual waiting, but in the quiet she’d begun to imagine police cars pouring up the long hill toward the house, the blurred wheel of a helicopter blade rising over the ridge. Blackclad SWAT team snipers creeping down through the grass on their stomachs. Somehow the druggy-seeming, dead-eyed indifference of the three fugitives to their new situation had quadrupled her usually manageable paranoia, as if each of them had a soldier’s freight of it they’d unstrapped and shrugged onto her. The previous morning, her second morning in the house, she had awoken with the dawn light, starving, after eating a bowl of dry cereal for her dinner. Feeling her way into the kitchen, she’d found Juan there, hunched under his blanket again. He seemed to have worked open the second jug of wine with the use of a penknife, but now he was dragging the blade through the flesh of his arm. “Don’t,” she gasped, and when he looked up at her he might have thought she was either Yvonne or Pauline, he seemed so unsurprised. “I don’t feel it,” he said. Then he stood up wonkily and she thought he would pitch past her onto the floor. “This is only a dream,” he slurred, clutching the jug with the unbloodied arm and weaving back toward his room.
When she called the street phone Frazer answered immediately. “What is it,” he said. She was only supposed to call him this way in the case of a dire emergency, and now she wondered how she could convince him, without his having been in the deathly still house. She tried to explain, but of course he did not understand. “Are they writing?” he asked.
“Rob, they’re not eating.”
“They weren’t so bad off before. I saw them eat in California.”
“That was in California. California’s their home. Here they’re like—fish out of water. Lying there.” She didn’t want to say dying.
There was silence on the line, or at least there was silence from Frazer. She could hear the traffic on Broadway, like a cyclone of honking. “I’m scared,” she admitted.
“Keep your cool.”
“I don’t know how to help them.”
“Of course you do. If anybody knows what to do, it’s you. Just get them busy. We don’t have unlimited time.”
“I know that.”
“For the moment they’ve pulled the good vanishing act, but they need to make the most of the moment. They need to pound out that book.”
“It doesn’t seem like they care. It doesn’t seem like they care if they live.”
“Bullshit. I don’t believe that. They’re the warriors, Jen. They have balls. Bigger balls than I’ve got. Remind them who they are.”
“How can I do that, when I’m not even sure who they are?”
“What? They’re the most important people in the country, that’s who they are! They’ve scared the pants off the government, they’ve made the average American think, Is this some wacky dream? Is our society really so flawed that we’ve spawned these hard cases who won’t take the shit? And the answer is yes. The richest girl in the world has said This is a lie, I’d rather shoot up the place. Jenny, we can’t stay on the phone for much longer, I’m on the corner of Broadway and 116th and somebody might hear me.”
“Then come up here! Talk to them like you’re talking to me. They need it, they need something—”
“I’ll be there two weeks from today. I know, my schedule’s crazy. This week is out, this weekend is completely impossible, next week is out, but next weekend I’m coming. Don’t worry. By then they’ll have written a pile.”
SHE WASN’T SURE if it was true that they didn’t care whether they lived or died; but it seemed to her that all their energy, what little there was of it, went toward drinking wine and avoiding daylight. The night after her encounter with Juan she’d been awakened again, by a sound of voices; the voices were low, but she’d left her bedroom door open to help with a breeze. Again, they were down in the kitchen. “You’re the one who always talks about karma.” The oddly familiar small voice of Pauline.
“That’s not karma.” Also a woman: Yvonne.
“If Juan hadn’t stolen that thing in the store . . . if he’d just acted straight like he says—”
“Straight people don’t buy bandoliers. Juan was thinking. And it would have been fine if that pig—I hate those rent-a-cop assholes—”
“But we didn’t need it, everybody had two. We didn’t need a bandolier.”
“Since when do you know what we need? Since when are you the least authorized to have a fucking opinion?”
Now both girls fell silent, and she didn’t even hear the creaks of the old wooden chairs. She lay perfectly still so as not to make noise with the bedsprings. It was the first time she’d heard Yvonne speak. Yvonne’s voice was bossy, attention-desiring. It reminded Jenny of Yvonne’s body when Jenny had seen it, barely clad in its tight underwear. Though her tone was low, almost a stage whisper, her voice seemed too large for the furtiveness of the discussion. Whatever they were talking about, it was clear that they wouldn’t have spoken that way with Juan present. And Jenny also felt sure it pertained to the deaths of their comrades—even more so when Yvonne added, ending the silence, “I know you think it’s Juan’s fault. But what about you? You were supposed to give us cover, and you were too slow.”
“I don’t think it’s Juan’s fault. I’m just—” Pauline started crying. “I’m sad,” she wailed, her voice, even while wailing, so soft Jenny barely could hear it.
“Shhh. Oh, Polly. Shh. He’ll wake up.” Now Yvonne’s bossiness was more like the reproach of a mother. Jenny heard a creak as someone rose, then liquid being poured—another jug of wine.
“Careful,” Yvonne said. “You’ll spill it.” After a few silent moments—”I’m sad, too,” Yvonne said. “I’m so sad I feel dead.”
“I wish I was dead.”
“Shut up.” And then, more carefully, “You can say that to me. But don’t ever say that to Juan. You know why.”
‘“The brave don’t fear death. The weak desire it,”’ Pauline said, clearly quoting.
Coming into the house now with the first load of groceries, Jenny was surprised to find them in the front room, although with all the windows shut, the drapes drawn, and a thick haze of smoke in the air. If they had been talking before she opened the door, they were silent now. They looked up at her like one person, but without expectation or interest. Pauline was curled on her side on the couch with a newspaper crossword on the cushion in front of her and a pencil dangling loosely from her hand. Juan and Yvonne were lying on the floor. The small radio that had come up in the car with them from Carol and Frazer’s was on, barely tuned to a station; she thought she could hear snatches of big band beneath a constant wash of static, but while the radio was loud in the cramped room no one moved to turn the dial, or turn it off. Outside the day had been hot for hours, and she could smell them, their unwashed bodies pungent and sour, their stink intermingling with the smell of their wine. “I brought you the paper, and the news magazines,” she said. Last week had been the week of black smoke and orange flame on the covers of Newsweek and Time, and the headline, “Surrounded!” Between the covers, the radiant family photos of all twelve of the comrades from their previous, normal American lives. That had been before the nine bodies were positively numbered as nine, and each ID’d by its teeth, and Juan and Yvonne and Pauline were confirmed to be missing. This week marked a lull, and other stories had reclaimed the front covers. “It’s good news,” she said, holding the pile out toward them. “You’ve disappeared without a trace. The FBI is intensifying its manhunt in L.A. and points south, all the way into Mexico. You’ve been spotted on the West Coast from Canada to Tijuana, but nowhere in the East.”
Juan had managed to sit upright while she was talking, and now he took the week’s news from her hands. She saw an ugly fresh scab on his arm. “Thank you,” he said. For a long moment he didn’t seem to know what to do next. Then, “Intelligence,” he murmured, and passed Time to Yvonne, and the newspapers to Pauline, keeping Newsweek for himself. Pauline gazed down at the front pages. Yvonne fingered Time idly.
“I was thinking,” she said. “It might help if you wrote down your feelings about your lost comrades. Your remembrances of them. It might help you—I know you’re in pain.”
They were suddenly staring at her as if she had suggested their comrades be resurrected and then murdered again. “That’s none of your business,” Yvonne said.
“We’re fine,” Juan said harshly. “We’ll get to that book when we get to it.”
That they would think she was only trying to prod them into writing their book, as if she were Frazer, made her discard her caution. “I didn’t mean the book. I meant that maybe, before you can do that, you have to write about them. Write a eulogy for them.”
“We’ll eulogize them with the blood of the pigs they were killed by!” This was Juan, suddenly full of fire.
“An eye for an eye. That’s enlightened.”
“That’s the revolution, Sister,” he sneered.
She lingered another moment in the doorway, gazing back at their six hostile eyes fixed on her; then she turned away into the kitchen and went out the back door. She sat down on the bumper of the Bug, the rest of the groceries still in the backseat, and lit herself a cigarette. She was remembering what Frazer had said—not about their being the most important people in America. Nor about how they were warriors. It was what he’d confessed to her after they’d argued and glared and subsided that night in his Rhinebeck motel room—that the three fugitives had seemed so young to him, the first time he had met them. He’d meant that he, Frazer, was illegitimately old—too old, he’d worried, to keep their confidence. But they were young. Not young like the kid who had carried her groceries, but still young. Frazer would have laughed at her if she’d said this to him. Juan and Yvonne were only a few years younger than she was, twenty-two or twenty-three. Pauline had just turned twenty. Not such big differences, but they felt big to her. At twenty-three she’d been beginning her life underground, and she couldn’t say she hadn’t also been undisciplined, and terrified, and aflame with self-pity. She’d done and said stupid things out of anger, and an almost suicidal urge to be caught. And herself at twenty? That was the first year she’d been with William, before which she had known almost nothing. Both these ages of hers, looked at now, seemed like children to her. She was amazed that each one was herself, and not so long ago.
WHEN FRAZER HAD found her in Rhinecliff she’d been in the middle of a letter to William. The letter of his she’d been answering, almost four weeks old now, had said this: “I’ve been thinking a lot about zealots. How they taint the whole lake of ideas they drink from, and taint everyone who might share that lake with them. I assume you know the ‘comrades’ I mean; you keep up with the news.” The first time she’d read this she’d actually been annoyed, that their need for a code seemed to have unleashed in William a tendency toward pompous phrases she’d never suspected. Now she didn’t just feel guilty for having thought such an unkind thing of him. She was in a house with those very same “zealots,” and she had to conceal it from him. She refolded his letter, and listened; it was early morning, and they didn’t seem to have stirred out of bed. She took out her own letter-in-progress and skimmed it critically. Every day since leaving Wildmoor she’d tried to finish it, but she was stymied by the number of things that she had to leave out. Finally she started fresh and wrote an account of her quest for the yellow croquet ball, as if she were still at Wildmoor. She’d do better next time. How could she know right away how to translate this new situation? She had to be honest with William while at the same time dropping no clue the prison censors could possibly grasp, and although this meant, basically, lying to William, she still wanted to think that it didn’t.
The truth was that her whole correspondence with William, which she constantly thought of and poured so much energy into, in some way made her miserable. The first time she’d written to him she had signed the short note, in code as obvious as it was foolproof, from his “sister.” He’d responded chastely as her “brother.” And this had seemed wonderful, that in the midst of their crisis, in one small respect, they had both understood what to do. Yet the template was limited. Though William’s letters were more daring than hers were, they still seemed impaired. She knew the letters could only ever be indications, puffs, of smoke from far sides of a canyon, but more and more they seemed to her the essence of her connection to William, and that connection seemed less and less strong. Dana only resealed William’s letters in new envelopes, but tearing the envelopes open Jenny felt a cool draft. And so how must he feel, reading her declarations, already blunted and constrained by their code, and then in Dana’s slanting, regular hand? So different from Jenny’s own, her pointy insistent block letters, her underlinings and loud exclamations. All of that was ironed out in Dana’s transcriptions, and perhaps a little of Jenny’s love was lost also, like steam. She still had his wonderfully formed, upright writing, like notes on a staff, but now it kept to a strange measured tone: “I love you very much. I’m finding good work to do. I’ve been thinking a lot about zealots.” They’d never written letters to each other before his arrest because they’d never had to, and perhaps it wasn’t a skill they possessed and meant nothing in terms of their love. But still, she believed in the romance of letters, and her stomach hurt when she read his. His letters arguably lacked nothing, but she couldn’t stop searching them for an intangible something, the orthographic equivalent of his hands on her skin.
As always, she felt him more fully once she’d put his letter away again in her battered brown accordion file with the limp ribbon for tying it shut. The file was the one thing she’d taken from Dick and Helen’s apartment; it had been in the trash, and had Tax Yr ’64 scrawled hugely across it. It was so full by now she kept thinking the ribbon would break, but she managed to tie it shut, squeezing the file with her knees. Now she could lose herself the way she longed to lose herself in the letters. She thought of their bedroom in Berkeley, the windows open to the breeze, the slight light from the street sifting in. She thought of their mushy old bed, the mattress from Salvation Army that had made a soft dent right away in its center for them, as if they were musical instruments set in its case. Then she thought of his body. The reddish-blond translucence of his hair. The undulations of the blue vein, so prominent though deep within his skin, on the underside of his penis. Her eyes flew open, as if she’d been caught, though the real reason she’d stopped herself was that it disturbed her how quickly these details had faded. For a long time she’d been remembering him by reference to her previous attempts to remember. She didn’t know when she’d last remembered, just by reference to him.
SINCE THEIR FIRST morning in the house a box of writing equipment—a typewriter, a reporter’s cassette-tape recorder in a Naugahyde carrying case, bales of loose scrap paper that seemed to have been scooped up off somebody’s floor, spiral notebooks, notepads, and several rubber-banded bundles of ball-point pens and pencils, all violently deformed at their ends from long, powerful chewing, which meant that they and everything else had been harvested from Frazer’s home office—had been sitting untouched just inside the back door. When she went downstairs a few minutes later to see if the box contained any envelopes better than the ones that she already had, it was missing, and the front room door closed. Putting her ear near the door she heard the tentative pops of the typewriter keys. Pop . . . pop pop pop. Then, silence. A coffeepot had been unearthed and a warm inch of coffee still sat in the bottom. She filled a cup and let herself out the back door. The day was buzzing and humid, high June; she walked around front, past the side window over the kitchen sink, past the front-facing window over the kitchen table, and stopped there, out of sight of the rest of the house. Without going farther she could tell that they’d opened the windows. She heard Juan’s voice, carried out on the breeze. “No. Every word should go in like a knife.”
“I was thinking about it all night,” Pauline said.
“It still sounds like a fucking Hallmark. ‘Evan, you were the man of my dreams.’”
“Oh, just let her,” Yvonne said, annoyed.
By that evening they’d moved from the typewriter to the tape recorder. The typewriter had been silent for stretches of hours; had then pecked like a hen thoughtfully; had sometimes erupted in great fluid bursts, like a rain of small rocks on the roof. At some point it had crashed on the floor; Jenny heard the bright ding of the carriage returning. Compared to those sporadic spasms the tape recording was a constant vague dirge. Someone droned on at length, stopped short, droned again in the same shaky rhythm. Someone else paced and mumbled intently. The tape recorder made a loud clack as it was turned on and off, like a branch being broken. She crept around the kitchen making toast and heating soup from a can, but when she knocked to see if they wanted to eat, all their efforts derailed. “Ah, shit!” Juan cried as she peered through the door. Now they had to start over again. They couldn’t have background noise—that was why the windows were all shut again, and, less obviously, why the room’s only lamp had been snuffed by a blanket. “Listen,” Juan said. There was nothing to hear but the night-insects sawing and creaking. But had there been noises like this back in Berkeley, Juan wanted to know? Just exactly like this? And listen now—Pauline and Yvonne tilted their heads, as if to sharpen their ears. A night flight was passing over, so far above that if it were daytime they would just see the jet as a tiny white flake in the sky. Its slight noise like a faraway ocean—but what if there was some Harvard-trained FBI pig who could hear that and say, “That was Pan American flight 405 heading from Chicago to London at thirty-nine thousand feet on June 9—let’s search all points underneath its flight path?”
It wasn’t until the next morning that she had any idea of what Juan had been talking about. The noise of the car’s doors awoke her. Going to her window hugging herself against the early chill she saw the three of them crawling over the car like a scavenging pack of street urchins. She pulled on her jeans and went downstairs and out the back door, feeling the cold dew on the soles of her feet. For a moment she just took them in, seeing them outdoors and beneath sunlight for the first time. They were bloodshot and fevered and pale. Their hair was lank, and their clothes looked too big. Carol had bought the car used, with cash, and never registered it, but there had still been an old insurance card and owner’s manual in the glove box. These had now been thrown onto the grass. The map she had bought on her trip into town had been hurled forth as well, and little balls of tin foil and dirty pennies and cigarette butts were raining onto the ground. From opposite sides of the car Pauline and Yvonne began yanking out the mats and digging into the seat cracks, all the while casting burning glances at each other as if to say, See? I thought of it! Juan slowed down, then stopped; he leaned heavily back on the car and for the first time looked at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Pauline and Yvonne didn’t glance at her. “Finished eulogy,” Juan said, and from the gravel in his voice she could tell they’d stayed up the whole night. “Gotta go.” Juan heaved himself off the car with one arm. She saw he was holding the car keys. She’d left them clipped to the sun visor.
She took a careful step forward. “Go where?”
“Go deliver. A radio station. Pigs’ll know we avenge our comrades.” Juan raked a hand through his thicket of hair. “Come on,” he said to Pauline and Yvonne. For the first time Jenny noticed a small package perched suspensefully on the roof of the Bug. From its size it could have been a sandwich, but there was something so disturbed about the way it had been wrapped, in many sheets of note paper secured with scores of different-colored rubber bands, that any person who saw it would find it suspicious. “Radio station?” she said.
Pauline and Yvonne had backed out of the car. “We have to get our tape out there,” Yvonne said, as if Jenny were dense.
“But that eulogy was supposed to be for you, to help you—to heal you and help you move on. You can’t take it to a radio station.” None of them seemed to hear her. Juan was shrugging off his work shirt, then winding it in a loose mitt around one hand, and with that hand grabbing the package. “Okay,” she said. “That’s good, you don’t want to get prints on the tape. And your precautions last night, about background noise—I understand all that now. I hope I didn’t compromise things. You wouldn’t want to undo all that effort by driving into town in broad daylight to a radio station, when no one even knows that you’re on the East Coast.”
“You can quit with your protocol lecture,” Juan said.
Now she’d run out of patience. “You can’t just get in a car and deliver a tape! Have you forgotten that there are people out there who’d be happy to kill you?”
“I’ll kill them! Come and watch me.”
“Give me the keys, Juan.”
“Don’t tell him what to do,” Yvonne exclaimed. “He’s in command here, not you.”
“Every day that we’re silent’s a crime on our comrades,” Pauline piped up hoarsely.
She tried to ignore them and win over Juan, the commander. “Give me the keys, Juan,” she said in a comradely tone. “Even if you’re not seen, if you leave that tape at a station around here we’ll get agents all over the place.”
“We’re not going to leave it at a station,” Juan said with disgust, getting into the car. “We’re going to mail it to one.”
“There’ll be the postmark.”
“We’ll mail it to someone who’ll mail it for us.”
“Who? Everyone you’ve ever known is under surveillance!”
“You told us to do this!” Juan roared, jerking out of the car again—he wanted to lunge, but he couldn’t get far without letting go of the wheel. “We want this tape on the radio now, we’re gonna swear vengeance now—”
“You said so yourself!” Yvonne said.
“I meant you should do it for you, not to broadcast all over the world!”
Juan got back in the car, slammed the door shut and started the engine. The car jerked and belched as he stomped on the gas. “Come on, Y. Not you,” to Pauline.
“But what if you’re caught?” Pauline cried.
It still seemed possible this was a ruse, a game of chicken, but Juan shoved the Bug into gear. It hopped forward and then stopped again. Pauline, suddenly sobbing, was struggling with the passenger-door handle. “Polly,” Yvonne admonished. Yvonne had both her palms pressed down over the door lock so Pauline couldn’t lift it. “We’ll be back, Sister, stop. Sister, stop it!”
“Goddammit, I’ll go!” she said finally, running up to Juan’s side of the car. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it right, just get out of the car. If you’re caught it’s the end of me, too.”
“When the pigs took your old man, did you just shrug and say That’s okay? Go ahead Nazis, take my old man?” Juan yelled wildly. “Did you?”
At last Juan had turned off the engine and handed over the keys. Going inside she felt their three gazes suspiciously tracking her progress. From her room she got her letter to William and her postal supplies, so that once she was out of their sight she could repack the tape. Before going back down she glanced out the window. They were there, clumped together just next to the car. They knew they had to let her do this, though they weren’t yet sure if they could trust her. She wasn’t sure, either. Her first thought when she was finally driving away was of burying the tape miles off, where it would never be found. But she knew that she wouldn’t. She’d been thinking again about death. The first year after William’s arrest she’d never slept well, never through the whole night, and she still woke sometimes with a shock, as if William were dead. Yet his death was impossible to her; she knew this, because she couldn’t be grateful for his life as it was. Did death seem more likely when someone had actually died? She thought the reverse must be true. Which was why mourning had to be done, vengeful eulogies written and broadcast. Maybe they were all trying to believe in death, the three of them to grieve properly, she to grieve less—she glanced back and saw them small in her rearview as the hillside rose up. Then they dropped out of sight.